BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0 ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR94-230 ENTRY:: January 20, 1995 ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science TITLE:: A Multiprocessor Extension to the Conventional File System Interface TYPE:: Technical Report (paper) REVISION:: 3 AUTHOR:: Nieuwejaar, Nils AUTHOR:: Kotz, David NOTE:: The 'January' in DATE is an arbitrary placeholder. DATE:: January 1994 RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to Technical Report Librarian Department of Computer Science Dartmouth College 6211 Sudikoff Laboratory Hanover, NH 03755-3510 USA RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-230.ps.Z RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-230.pdf 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 CHARISMA project. NOTE:: This report has been superceded by report PCS-TR95-253. END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR94-230