Evaluating ParFiSys : a high-performance parallel and distributed file system

Abstract We present an overview of ParFiSys , a coherent parallel file system developed at the UPM to provide I/O services to the GPMIMD machine, an MPP built within the ESPRIT project P-5404. Special emphasis is made on the results obtained during ParFiSys evaluation. They were obtained using several I/O benchmarks (PARKBENCH, IOBENCH, etc.) and several MPP platforms (T800, T9000, etc.) to cover a big spectrum of the ParFiSys features, being specifically oriented to measure throughput for scientific applications I/O patterns . ParFiSys is specially well suited to provide I/O services to scientific applications requiring high I/O bandwidth, to minimize application porting effort, and to exploit the parallelism of generic message-passing multicomputers.