Which file system is designed for high-performance computing and scalability in Linux?

XFS is a high-performance file system designed specifically for scalability, particularly in enterprise-level environments. It was developed by Silicon Graphics in the early 1990s and optimized for large systems that require efficient storage management, extensive file and directory handling, and swift access to large files. Its features include support for large file sizes (up to 8 exabytes) and large volume sizes, as well as advanced capabilities for journaling, metadata, and I/O operations. This makes XFS particularly suited for high-performance computing applications that deal with significant data loads and require robust performance.

While the other file systems have their own strengths, they are not specifically tailored for the high-performance computing scenarios that XFS excels in. ext4, for example, is widely used as the default file system for many Linux distributions due to its balance of performance, robustness, and ease of use, but it doesn't match XFS in scalability for applications that involve very large files or require optimized I/O throughput. APFS, on the other hand, is designed for macOS and iOS environments, and NTFS is primarily associated with Windows file systems, neither of which are designed for optimizing performance in Linux specifically.