An Implementation of  the Vesta Parallel File System API  on the Galley Parallel File System

Dartmouth Technical Report PCS-TR98-329

	Matthew P. Carter
	David Kotz

Date: April 1998

URL (compressed postscript): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-329.ps.Z> (208KB)

URL (PDF): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-329.pdf> (144KB)

Abstract:
 To demonstrate the flexibility of the Galley parallel file system and
 to analyze the efficiency and flexibility of the Vesta parallel file
 system interface, we implemented Vesta's application-programming
 interface on top of Galley.  We implemented the Vesta interface using
 Galley's file-access methods, whose design arose from extensive testing
 and characterization of the I/O requirements of scientific applications
 for high-performance multiprocessors.  We used a parallel CPU, parallel
 I/O, out-of-core matrix-multiplication application to test the Vesta
 interface in both its ability to specify data access patterns and in
 its run-time efficiency.  In spite of its powerful ability to specify the
 distribution of regular, non-overlapping data access patterns across
 disks, we found that the Vesta interface has some significant
 limitations.  We discuss these limitations in detail in the paper,
 along with the performance results.