View I/O: improving the performance of non-contiguous I/O

This paper presents view I/O, a non-contiguous parallel I/O technique. We show that the linear file model may be an unsuitable abstraction for non-contiguous I/O optimizations. Additionally, the poor cooperation between a file system and an I/O library like MPI-IO may drastically affect the performance. View I/O has detailed knowledge about parallel structure of a file and about the potential access pattern and exploits it in order to improve performance. The access overhead is reduced by using a strategy "declare once, use several times" and by file off-set compaction. We compare and contrast view I/O with other non-contiguous I/O methods. Our measurements on a cluster of computers indicate a significant performance improvement over other approaches.