@InProceedings{thakur:mpi-io-implement,
  author = {Rajeev Thakur and William Gropp and Ewing Lusk},
  title = {On Implementing {MPI-IO} Portably and with High Performance},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel
  and Distributed Systems},
  year = {1999},
  month = {May},
  pages = {23--32},
  earlier = {thakur:mpi-io-implement-tr},
  URL = {http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~thakur/papers/mpio-impl.ps},
  keywords = {parallel I/O, multiprocessor file system interface, pario-bib},
  abstract = {We discuss the issues involved in implementing MPI-IO portably on
  multiple machines and file systems and also achieving high performance. One
  way to implement MPI-IO portably is to implement it on top of the basic Unix
  I/O functions ({\tt open}, {\tt lseek}, {\tt read}, {\tt write}, and {\tt
  close}), which are themselves portable. We argue that this approach has
  limitations in both functionality and performance. We instead advocate an
  implementation approach that combines a large portion of portable code and a
  small portion of code that is optimized separately for different machines and
  file systems. We have used such an approach to develop a high-performance,
  portable MPI-IO implementation, called ROMIO. \par In addition to basic I/O
  functionality, we consider the issues of supporting other MPI-IO features,
  such as 64-bit file sizes, noncontiguous accesses, collective I/O,
  asynchronous I/O, consistency and atomicity semantics, user-supplied hints,
  shared file pointers, portable data representation, and file preallocation.
  We describe how we implemented each of these features on various machines and
  file systems. The machines we consider are the HP Exemplar, IBM SP, Intel
  Paragon, NEC SX-4, SGI Origin2000, and networks of workstations; and the file
  systems we consider are HP HFS, IBM PIOFS, Intel PFS, NEC SFS, SGI XFS, NFS,
  and any general Unix file system (UFS). \par We also present our thoughts on
  how a file system can be designed to better support MPI-IO. We provide a list
  of features desired from a file system that would help in implementing MPI-IO
  correctly and with high performance.}
}