Abstract: A high-performance computing (HPC) system is described. The system includes at least one administrative leader node including a distributed file system server to host a plurality of filesystem images to facilitate a shared filed system, one or more storage devices configured as shared storage having a writable area to host filesystem images for the shared filed system and a plurality of compute nodes, wherein each compute node to mount a compute-node specific directory received from the server in the writable area in the shared storage and mount a filesystem within a filesystem image as a read-write area at the shared storage.