Abstract: A high performance, linearly scalable, software-defined, RAM-based storage architecture designed for in-memory RAM based petascale systems, including a method to aggregate system RAM memory across multiple clustered nodes. The architecture realizes a parallel storage system where multiple petabytes of data can be hosted entirely in RAM memory. The resulting system eliminates the scalability limitation of any traditional in-memory approach using a file system based scale-out approach with low latency, high bandwidth, and scalable IOPS running entirely in RAM.