@InCollection{corbett:mpi-overview-book, author = {Peter Corbett and Dror Feitelson and Sam Fineberg and Yarsun Hsu and Bill Nitzberg and Jean-Pierre Prost and Marc Snir and Bernard Traversat and Parkson Wong}, title = {Overview of the {MPI-IO} Parallel {I/O} Interface}, booktitle = {Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems}, chapter = {5}, editor = {Ravi Jain and John Werth and James C. Browne}, crossref = {iopads-book}, year = {1996}, series = {The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science}, volume = {362}, pages = {127--146}, publisher = {Kluwer Academic Publishers}, earlier = {corbett:mpi-overview}, keywords = {parallel I/O, file system interface, pario-bib}, abstract = {Thanks to MPI, writing portable message passing parallel programs is almost a reality. One of the remaining problems is file I/O. Although parallel file systems support similar interfaces, the lack of a standard makes developing a truly portable program impossible. It is not feasible to develop large scientific applications from scratch for each generation of parallel machine, and, in the scientific world, a program is not considered truly portable unless it not only compiles, but also runs efficiently. \par The MPI-IO interface is being proposed as an extension to the MPI standard to fill this need. MPI-IO supports a high-level interface to describe the partitioning of file data among processes, a collective interface describing complete transfers of global data structures between process memories and files, asynchronous I/O operations, allowing computation to be overlapped with I/O, and optimization of physical file layout on storage devices (disks).}, comment = {Part of a whole book on parallel I/O; see iopads-book.} }