An Implementation of the Vesta Parallel File System API on the Galley Parallel File System

To demonstrate the flexibility of the Galley parallel file system and to analyze the efficiency and flexibility of the Vesta parallel file system interface, we implemented Vesta\u27s application-programming interface on top of Galley. We implemented the Vesta interface using Galley\u27s file-access methods, whose design arose from extensive testing and characterization of the I/O requirements of scientific applications for high-performance multiprocessors. We used a parallel CPU, parallel I/O, out-of-core matrix-multiplication application to test the Vesta interface in both its ability to specify data access patterns and in its run-time efficiency. In spite of its powerful ability to specify the distribution of regular, non-overlapping data access patterns across disks, we found that the Vesta interface has some significant limitations. We discuss these limitations in detail in the paper, along with the performance results