Remote I/O Fast Access to Distant Storage

As high-speed networks make it easier to use distributed resources, it becomes increasingly common that applications and their data are not colocated. Users have traditionally addressed this problem by manually staging data to and from remote computers. We argue instead for a remote I/O paradigm in which programs use familiar parallel I/O interfaces to access remote filesystems. In addition to simplifying remote execution, remote I/O can improve performance relative to staging by overlapping computation and data transfer or by reducing communication requirements. However, remote I/O also introduces new technical challenges in the areas of portability, performance, and integration with distributed computing systems. We propose techniques designed to address these challenges and describe a remote I/O library called RIO that we are developing to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques. RIO addresses issues of portability by adopting the quasi-standard MPI-IO interface and by de�...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: IOPADS
• Authors: Ian T. Foster, David Kohr, Rakesh Krishnaiyer, Jace Mogill
• Keywords: IOPADS 1997, Remote I/o, Remote I/o Library, Remote I/o Paradigm