VIP-FS: a VIrtual, Parallel File System for High Performance Parallel and Distributed

In the past couple of years, signicant 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 tech-nologies 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 scientic and commercial application programs. Despite their popularity, message-passing libraries only provide part of the sup-port 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 le 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 le system which can execute over multiprocessor machines or heterogeneous network environments