A Parallel I/O System for High-Performance Distributed Computing

Abstract

PIOUS is a parallel file system architecture for providing process groups access to permanent storage within a heterogeneous network computing environment. PIOUS supports parallel application development by providing coordinated access to parafile file objects with guaranteed consistency semantics and a dynamically-selectable fault tolerance level. For performance, PIOUS declusters files to exploit the combined file I/O and buffer cache capacities of multiple interconnected computer systems. 1 Introduction Programming environments for developing distributed applications with groups of cooperating processes are becoming increasingly important for cost-effective, highperformance computing. Existing parallel-distributed computing environments, such as PVM [Sun90b] and Linda [ABC + 90], provide interprocess communication, synchronization and concurrency control, fault tolerance, and process management. However, many parallel applications require or could benefit from a unified parallel ..