NPAC Technical Report SCCS-628
The Design of VIP-FS: a Virtual, Parallel File System for High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing
Juan Miguel del Rosario, Michael Harry, Alok Choudhary
Submitted May 17 1994
Abstract
In the past couple of years, significant progress has been made in
the development of message-passing libraries for parallel and distributed
computing, and in the area of high-speed networking. Both technologies
have evolved to the point where programmers and scientists are now porting
many applications previously executed exclusively on parallel machines into
distributed programs for execution on more readily available networks of
workstations. Such advances in computing technology have also led to a
tremendous increase in the amount of data being manipulated and produced by
scientific and commercial application programs. Despite their popularity,
message-passing libraries only provide part of the support necessary for most
high performance distributed computing applications -- support for high speed
parallel I/O is still lacking.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the conceptual design of
a parallel and distributed I/O file system, the Virtual Parallel File System
(VIP-FS), and describe its implementation. VIP-FS makes use of message-passing
libraries to provide a parallel and distributed file system which can execute
over multiprocessor machines or heterogeneous network environments.
KEYWORDS: Parallel I/O, data distribution, parallel architectures,
message-passing, distributed computing, distributed file systems.