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This paper presents the design of a MPI (Message Passing Interface) - basedparallel file system,MPFS. MPI-IO is an extension of MPI to support flexible logical file partition and physical file organization, as well as a rich set of file access functions. MPFS enables users to specify both logical file partition among userprocesses and physical file data layout across data servers. Present implementation includes full support of file data distribution, asynchronous I/O, shared file pointers,collective I/O operations, and limited support of data layout hints. Moreover, MPFSachieves portability by developing a user library that conforms a generic UNIX interface. However, MPFS does not support FORTRAN interface, error handling andprofiling in MPI-IO specification. MPFS has been implemented on a workstationcluster connected by Fast Ethernet. The performance measurements of MPFS showthat the message passing overhead is minimal but the performance is limited by the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet.
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