The design of VIP-FS: a virtual, parallel file system for high performance parallel and distributed computing

  • Authors:

  • Michael Harry;Juan Miguel del Rosario;Alok Choudhary

  • Affiliations:

  • CIS Dept., Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, 111 College Place, RM 3-201, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY;CIS Dept., Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, 111 College Place, RM 3-201, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY;ECE Dept., Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, 111 College Place, RM 3-201, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

In the past couple of years, significant progress has been made in the development of message-passing libraries for parallel and distributed computing, and in the area of high-speed networking. Both technologies have evolved to the point where programmers and scientists are now porting many applications previously executed exclusively on parallel machines into distributed programs for execution on more readily available networks of workstations. Such advances in computing technology have also led to a tremendous increase in the amount of data being manipulated and produced by scientific and commercial application programs. Despite their popularity, message-passing libraries only provide part of the support necessary for most high performance distributed computing applications --- support for high speed parallel I/O is still lacking.In this paper, we provide an overview of the conceptual design of a parallel and distributed I/O file system, the Virtual Parallel File System (VIP-FS), and describe its implementation. VIP-FS makes use of message-passing libraries to provide a parallel and distributed file system which can execute over multiprocessor machines or heterogeneous network environments.