A Parallel File System for Networks of Workstations

We have implemented an application-level parallel file system for a cluster of networks of workstations and network-attached secure disks (NASDs). The file system is compliant with the SIO low-level application programming interface. As such, this parallel file system supports much-needed concurrent write sharing among the tasks of a parallel program. This file system is designed to operate outside of operating system kernels and provides dynamically configurable failure tolerance and performance, by exploiting the underlying storage service offering configurable storage quality.

Work in this area has previously been done in the context of SPFS (the scotch parallel file system) which has been superceded by the current parallel file system.