An Interleaved File System for the Butterfly
Carla S. Ellis, Peter Dibble · 1987
It is widely recognized that significant advances in computational power require some form of parallel processing. This has led to a range of proposals for multiprocessor architectures. It seems that traditional file access is one issue that has been deferred in the development of many of these new parallel machines and the software programming environments designed to make them usable. The project described in this paper is a first attempt to investigate the architectural considerations involved in providing a file system and its potential role for applications in the context of the BBN Butterfly multiprocessor. We have implemented a prototype called Bridge that distributes file data in an interleaved fashion over the secondary memories of multiple processor nodes. We discuss the design choices we have made, some preliminary experiences with the implementation, and opportunities this kind of file structure presents for algorithm design.