SPIFFI-a scalable parallel file system for the Intel Paragon

This paper presents the design and performance of SPIFFI, a scalable high-performance parallel file system intended for use by extremely I/O intensive applications including "Grand Challenge" scientific applications and multimedia systems. This paper contains experimental results from a SPIFFI prototype on a 64 node/64 disk Intel Paragon. The results show that SPIFFI provides high performance and linear scaleup on real hardware. The paper also explains how shared file pointers (i.e., file pointers that are shared by multiple processes) can simplify the design of a parallel application. By sequentializing I/O accesses and by providing dynamic I/O load balancing, a shared file pointer may even improve an application's performance. This paper also presents the predictions of a SPIFFI simulator that we validated using the prototype. The simulator results show that SPIFFI continues to provide high performance even when it is scaled to configurations with as many as 128 disks or 256 compute nodes.