A Software Architecture for Massively Parallel Input-Output

. For an increasing number of data intensive scientific applications, parallel I/O concepts are a major performance issue. Tackling this issue, we provide an outline of an input/output system designed for highly efficient, scalable and conveniently usable parallel I/O on distributed memory systems. The main focus of this paper is the parallel I/O runtime system support provided for software-generated programs produced by parallelizing compilers in the context of High Performance FORTRAN efforts. Specifically, our design is presented in the context of the Vienna Fortran Compilation System. 1 Introduction The main issues for I/O subsystems in supercomputing environments is to feed arrays of computing processors with huge amounts of raw data (nowadays typically in the Tbyte range) in such a way that neither the processor execution time nor the program turnaround time increase significantly. On the hardware side are disk arrays (RAID), HIPPI interfaces, data vaults, etc. the enabling tech..