PIOUS: A Scalable Parallel I/O System for Distributed Computing Environments

PIOUS is a parallel file system architecture that provides cost-effective, scalable bandwidth in a network computing environment. PIOUS employs data declustering, to exploit the combined file I/O and buffer cache capacities of networked computing resources, and transaction-based concurrency control, to guarantee access consistency without explicit synchronization. This paper presents preliminary results from a prototype PIOUS implementation. 1 Introduction Parallel programming environments that exploit networked computing resources offer a costeffective alternative to traditional parallel machines. Environments such as PVM [Sun90] and Linda [ABC + 90], among others [Tur93], enable parallel-distributed application development by providing mechanisms for interprocess communication, synchronization and concurrency control, fault tolerance, and process management. However, many parallel applications require or could benefit from a unified parallel I/O system that such environments gener..