Walt Ligon
walt@clemson.edu
Clemson University
Rob Ross
Argonne National Laboratory
One benefit of cluster computer architectures is the opportunity for
large I/O bandwidths. High performance applications that require
significant I/O throughput are increasingly of interest to the cluster
computing community. Parallel file systems are critical system software
components that allow parallel applications to take advantage of the
parallel I/O disk subsystems in a cluster architecture. The Parallel
Virtual File System (PVFS) was the first parallel file system developed
specifically for cluster architectures and today is a popular choice
for fast disk access. This tutorial introduces the basic concepts
behind parallel file systems and specific information about PVFS.
The emphasis is on using PVFS to implement effective applications that
require substantial I/O performance. Topics include fundamental concepts,
PVFS specifics, I/O interfaces including MPI-IO, example applications,
performance tuning, and the future of PVFS.
Dr. Ligon is an Associate Professor in the Holcombe Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. His research
interests are in high performance computing, focusing on parallel file
systems, problem solving environments, and reconfigurable computing.
Current projects include the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), Clemson
Environment for Remote Sensing (CERSe), and the Reconfigurable Computing
Application Development Environment (RCADE).
Dr. Ross is a postdoctoral researcher in the Mathematics and Computer
Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests
are in message passing and storage systems for high performance
computing environments, in particular cluster computing environments.
Current projects include the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), the
ROMIO MPI-IO implementation, and the MPICH implementation of the MPI
message passing interface.