VIP-FS: a VIrtual, Parallel File System for high performanceparallel and distributed computing

摘要

In the past couple of years, significant progress has been made inthe development of message-passing libraries for parallel anddistributed computing, and in the area of high-speed networking. Theseadvances in computing technology have also led to a tremendous increasein the amount of data being manipulated and produced by scientific andcommercial application programs. Despite their popularity,message-passing libraries only provide part of the support necessary formost high performance distributed computing applications-support forhigh speed parallel I/O is still lacking. In this paper, we provide anoverview of the conceptual design of a parallel and distributed I/O filesystem, the Virtual Parallel File System (VIP-FS), and describe itsimplementation. VIP-FS makes use of message-passing libraries to providea parallel and distributed file system which can execute overmultiprocessor machines or heterogeneous network environments