Pious: an Architecture for Parallel I/o in Distributed Computing Environments 1

PIOUS is a parallel le system architecture for providing process groups access to permanent storage within a heterogeneous network computing environment. PIOUS employs data declustering to exploit the combined le I/O and bu er cache capacities of multiple interconnected computer systems. Elements of the PIOUS architecture interoperate via transaction-based protocols to provide concurrency control and fault tolerance for parallel I/O operations. PIOUS is a true parallel I/O system that provides coordinated access to le objects with guaranteed consistency semantics. The PIOUS le system de nes para les, two-dimensional le objects that simplify mapping array data, and provides a process interface with a number of le views. Performance results from a PIOUS prototype are encouraging, demonstrating the e ectiveness of the PIOUS architecture for achieving cost-e ective, scalable le system performance within a network computing environment.