A Multiprocessor Extension to the Conventional File System Interface
Nils Nieuwejaar, David F. Kotz · 1994
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. 1 Introduction While the computational power of multiprocessors has been steadily increasing for years, the power of the I/O subsystem has not been keeping pace. This is partly due to hardware limitations, but the shortcomings of the file systems bear a large part of the responsibil...