DPFS: A Data-Parallel File System Environment
Dominique Sueur, Jean‐Luc Dekeyser, Philippe Marquet · 1998
. Most parallel I/O systems allow parallel accesses to sequential files. The DPFS is a multi-dimensional file system. Each file is a list of arrays distributed onto a grid of I/O processors as template onto HPF processor grids. I/O node topologies and distribution functions are placed at the device level. This means that file distribution only depend on their directory location. By using distributed parallel devices we keep a Unix-like environment. Files and directories are managed with usual shell commands. However, code portability and user friendly are not parallel environment main properties; they are above all built for efficiency. With DPFS, parallel I/O are completely asynchronous and the number of disk accesses is minimal. Moreover, when the I/O distribution matches the computing distribution all accesses are local. DPFS is available on workstation cluster of Alpha farm, Pc Linux and Sun4 stations at http://www.lifl.fr/west/sueur/DPFS. 1 Introduction Writing paral...