@MastersThesis{huber:msthesis, author = {James V. {Huber, Jr.}}, title = {{PPFS}: An Experimental File System for High Performance Parallel Input/Output}, year = {1995}, month = {February}, school = {Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign}, URL = {http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/Papers/huberMS.html}, keywords = {parallel file system, pario-bib}, abstract = {The I/O problem is described in the context of parallel scientific applications. A user-level input/output library, PPFS, is introduced to address these issues. The design and implementation of PPFS are presented. Some simple performance benchmarks are reported. Experiments on two production-scale applications are given.}, comment = {He describes the design and implementation of PPFS, along with some experimental results. PPFS is a C++ library and a set of servers that implement a parallel file system on top of unix on a cluster or a Paragon. Interesting features of PPFS include: files are a sequence of records (fixed size or variable size), read_next and read_any operations, a no-extend option to reduce overhead of maintaining file-size information, client and server caching, intermediate caching agents for consistency, prefetching and write behind, and user-defined declustering and indexing policies. User-defined changes actually have to be precompiled into the server programs. Good results in comparison to PFS on the Paragon, though that doesn't say much. They are porting it to the SP-2.} }