PARALLEL I/O AS A PARALLEL APPLICATION

Metacomputing environments provide a software platform for implementing parallel applications utilizing networked computing resources. Such programming environments offer a cost-effective alternative to parallel machines for many classes of problems. Unfortunately, most metacomputing environments either provide no I/O facilities, or serialize all I/O requests and thus limit application performance and scalability. PIOUS is a parallel file system designed to incorporate true parallel I/O into existing metacomputing environments. Because PIOUS is itself a parallel application, the functionality of a given metacomputing environment is extended without modification. This paper examines the PIOUS software architecture and programming model and presents preliminary results from a prototype PIOUS implementation. Performance results are encouraging, demonstrating the potential of the PIOUS architecture for achieving scalable file system bandwidth in a network computing environment.