Research Trends in High Performance Parallel Input/Output
                     for Cluster Environments

                           Thomas Ludwig


ABSTRACT

Parallel input/output in high performance computing is a field of
increasing importance. In particular with compute clusters we see the
concept of replicated resources being transferred to I/O
issues. Consequently, we find research questions like e.g. how to map
data structures to files, which resources to actually use, and how to
deal with failures in the environment. The paper will introduce the
problem of massive I/O from the userīs point of view and illustrate
available programming interfaces. After a short description of some
available parallel file systems we will concentrate on the research
directions in that field. Besides other questions, efficiency is the
main issue. It depends on an appropriate mapping of data structures
onto file segments which in turn are spread over physical disks. Our
own work concentrates on measuring the performance of individual
mappings and to change them dynamically to increase performance and
control the sharing of resources.


KEYWORDS

Parallel Programming, Parallel I/O, Cluster Computing