Multiprocessor File System Interfaces

Introduction MIMD multiprocessors are increasingly used for production supercomputing. Supercomputer applications often have tremendous file I/O requirements. Although newer I/O subsystems, which attach multiple disks to the multiprocessor, permit parallel file access, file system software often has insufficient support for parallel access to the parallel disks, which is necessary for scalable performance. Most existing multiprocessor file systems are based on the conventional file system interface (which has operations like open, close, read, write, and seek). Although this provides the familiar file abstraction, it is difficult to use for parallel access to a file. Scalable applications must cooperate to read or write a file in parallel. We propose an extension to the conventional interface, that supports the most common parallel access patterns, hides the details of the underlying parallel disk structure, and is implementable on both unipro