BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0 ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR96-288 ENTRY:: June 04, 1996 ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science TITLE:: The Panda Array I/O Library on the Galley Parallel File System TYPE:: Technical Report (paper) REVISION:: 1 AUTHOR:: Thomas, Joel T. DATE:: June 1996 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/TR96-288.ps.Z RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR96-288.pdf ABSTRACT:: The Panda Array I/O library, created at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was built especially to address the needs of high-performance scientific applications. I/O has been one of the most frustrating bottlenecks to high performance for quite some time, and the Panda project is an attempt to ameliorate this problem while still providing the user with a simple, high-level interface. The Galley File System, with its hierarchical structure of files and strided requests, is another attempt at addressing the performance problem. My project was to redesign the Panda Array library for use on the Galley file system. This project involved porting Panda's three main functions: a checkpoint function for writing a large array periodically for 'safekeeping,' a restart function that would allow a checkpointed file to be read back in, and finally a timestep function that would allow the user to write a group of large arrays several times in a sequence. Panda supports several different distributions in both the compute-node memories and I/O-node disks. We have found that the Galley File System provides a good environment on which to build high-performance libraries, and that the mesh of Panda and Galley was a successful combination. NOTE:: A Senior Undergraduate Honors Thesis. END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR96-288