As HPC systems have approached petascale, the demands on storage and I/O throughput of HPC workloads have brought about highly developed storage systems with unprecedented performance. Likewise, data intensive computing has driven new approaches to storage architectures that meet the needs of those programming models. This seminar presents the Parallel Virtual File System, its role as a software component in the petascale storage architecture, and as a platform that supports development of a variety of storage models and architectures.