Extending the Posix I/O Interface: A Parallel File System Perspective.

The POSIX interface does not lend itself well to enabling good performance for high-end applications. Extensions are needed in the POSIX I/O interface so that high-concurrency HPC applications running on top of parallel file systems perform well. This paper presents the rationale, design, and evaluation of a reference implementation of a subset of the POSIX I/O interfaces on a widely used parallel file system (PVFS) on clusters. Experimental results on a set of micro-benchmarks confirm that the extensions to the POSIX interface greatly improve scalability and performance