@InProceedings{huber:ppfs, author = {Jay Huber and Christopher L. Elford and Daniel A. Reed and Andrew A. Chien and David S. Blumenthal}, title = {{PPFS}: A High Performance Portable Parallel File System}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing}, year = {1995}, month = {July}, pages = {385--394}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {Barcelona}, earlier = {huber:ppfs-tr}, later = {huber:bppfs}, URL = {http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/Papers/ICS95-ppfs.html}, keywords = {parallel file system, parallel I/O, pario-bib}, abstract = {Rapid increases in processor performance over the past decade have outstripped performance improvements in input/output devices, increasing the importance of input/output performance to overall system performance. Further, experience has shown that the performance of parallel input/output systems is particularly sensitive to data placement and data management policies, making good choices critical. To explore this vast design space, we have developed a user-level library, the Portable Parallel File System (PPFS), which supports rapid experimentation and exploration. The PPFS includes a rich application interface, allowing the application to advertise access patterns, control caching and prefetching, and even control data placement. PPFS is both extensible and portable, making possible a wide range of experiments on a broad variety of platforms and configurations. Our initial experiments, based on simple benchmarks and two application programs, show that tailoring policies to input/output access patterns yields significant performance benefits, often improving performance by nearly an order of magnitude.} }