Abstract

Most current multiprocessor le systems are designed to use multiple disks in parallel, using the high aggregate bandwidth to meet the growing I/O requirements of parallel scienti c applications. Many multiprocessor le systems provide applications with a conventional Unix-like interface, allowing the application to access multiple disks transparently. Thisinterface conceals the parallelism within the le system, increasing the ease of programmability, but making it di cult or impossible for sophisticated programmers and libraries to use knowledge about their I/O needs to exploit that parallelism. In addition to providing an insu cient interface, most current multiprocessor le systems are optimized for a di erent workload than they are being asked to support. We introduce Galley, a new parallel le system that is intended to e ciently support realistic scienti c multiprocessor workloads. We discuss Galley's le structure and application interface, as well as the performance advantages o ered by that interface. 1

Citations