%T The Galley Parallel File System
%A Nils Nieuwejaar
%A David Kotz
%R Technical Report PCS-TR96-286
%I Dartmouth College, Computer Science
%C Hanover, NH
%D May 1996
%U http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR96-286.ps.Z
%X
 Most current multiprocessor file systems are designed to use multiple
 disks in parallel, using the high aggregate bandwidth to meet the growing
 I/O requirements of parallel scientific applications. Many multiprocessor
 file systems provide applications with a conventional Unix-like
 interface, allowing the application to access multiple disks
 transparently.  This interface conceals the parallelism within the file
 system, increasing the ease of programmability, but making it difficult
 or impossible for sophisticated programmers and libraries to use
 knowledge about their I/O needs to exploit that parallelism.  In addition
 to providing an insufficient interface, most current multiprocessor file
 systems are optimized for a different workload than they are being asked
 to support.  We introduce Galley, a new parallel file system that is
 intended to efficiently support realistic scientific multiprocessor
 workloads. We discuss Galley's file structure and application interface,
 as well as the performance advantages offered by that interface.
%Z
 Revised version appeared in the journal
 <a href="/~dfk/papers/jgalley.html">Parallel Computing</a>.
 This paper is a combination of two papers, from 
 <a href="/~dfk/papers/galley.html">ICS '96</a> 
 and a
 <a href="/~dfk/papers/galley-perf.html">IOPADS '96</a>.