@InProceedings{womble:outofcore, author = {David Womble and David Greenberg and Rolf Riesen and Stephen Wheat}, title = {Out of Core, Out of Mind: Practical Parallel {I/O}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Scalable Parallel Libraries Conference}, year = {1993}, month = {October}, pages = {10--16}, address = {Mississippi State University}, URL = {ftp://ftp.cs.sandia.gov/pub/papers/dewombl/parallel_io_scl93.ps.Z}, keywords = {parallel I/O, parallel file system, pario-bib}, abstract = {Parallel computers are becoming more powerful and more complex in response to the demand for computing power by scientists and engineers. Inevitably, new and more complex I/O systems will be developed for these systems. In particular we believe that the I/O system must provide the programmer with the ability to explicitly manage storage (despite the trend toward complex parallel file systems and caching schemes). One method of doing so is to have a partitioned secondary storage in which each processor owns a logical disk. Along with operating system enhancements which allow overheads such as buffer copying to be avoided and libraries to support optimal remapping of data, this sort of I/O system meets the needs of high performance computing.}, comment = {They argue that it is important to allow the programmer to explicitly control their storage in some way. In particular, they advocate the Partitioned Secondary Storage (PSS) model, in which each processor has its own logical disk, rather than using a parallel file system (PFS) which automatically stripes a linear file across many disks. Basically, programmer knows best. Of course, libraries can help. They note that you will often need data in a different format than it comes, and may need it output in a different format; so, permutation algorithms are needed. Also important to be able to overlap computation with I/O. They use LU factorization as an example, and give an algorithm. On the nCUBE with the PUMA operating system, they get good performance. See womble:pario.} }