Jesus Carretero and Alok Choudhary
Abstract
This document proposes the interface to MiPFS, a parallel file
system intended to be used as a low-level platform to develop more
complex I/O entities, like MPI, on top of it. High-perfomance and
standard functionality can be provided in client libraries or run-time
systems built on top of {\em MiPFS}. We propose a reduced interface to
parallel file system that includes basic I/O operations with scather-gather
addressing, file control operations, hints specification, and quality
of service negotiation.
This interface is based on the idea that the user should execute I/O
operations using the data types stored on each object, so that each
file can be managed as an {\em typed object}. However, as we want to provide
only mechanism, and not policies, {\em MiPFS} includes functions to
manage fixed and variable length records, and their associated indexes.
This approach, and the quality of service functionality, allows to
use MiPFS as a continuous media parallel file system.
Keywords: Parallel I/O systems, parallel file systems, multiprocessors, quality of service.