A Multiprocessor Extension to the Conventional File System Interface

Dartmouth Technical Report PCS-TR94-230

	Nils Nieuwejaar
	David Kotz

Date:  1994

URL (compressed postscript): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-230.ps.Z> (72KB)

URL (PDF): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-230.pdf> (180KB)

Abstract:
  As the I/O needs of parallel scientific applications increase, file
 systems for multiprocessors are being designed to provide applications
 with parallel access to multiple disks.  Many parallel file systems
 present applications with a conventional Unix-like interface that
 allows the application to access multiple disks transparently.  By
 tracing all the activity of a parallel file system in a production,
 scientific computing environment, we show that many applications
 exhibit highly regular, but non-consecutive I/O access patterns.
 Since the conventional interface does not provide an efficient method
 of describing these patterns, we present an extension which supports
 strided and nested-strided I/O requests.

Note:
 A result of the <A HREF="/~dfk/charisma.html">CHARISMA project</A>.
 This report has been superceded by report PCS-TR95-253.