C-PFS - Scalable Parallel IO for UNIX Clusters
CDAC Parallel file systems is an initiative to build cluster based high performance storage systems that caters to storage needs of applications belonging to various domains. Figure 1 depicts a client server based distributed system that allows parallel access to data from data storage by multiple processes, resulting in high performance input output. By providing MPI interface, it addresses the storage needs of the scientific and engineering supercomputing class applications. PFS solves the problem of I/O bottlenecks by exploiting parallelism for processing I/O requests both at client as well as server side.

Highlights :

• Delivers high performance to multiple processes
• Parallel at both client and server side
• Parallel layout of files (Supports File Striping)
  
• Span over multiple disks
• Use multiple I/O streams to access file data in parallel
• Optimized with techniques like Prefetching, collective I/O

Features :

• UNIX abstraction of file system hierarchy
• Allows coordinated I/O access through the multiple file pointers to reduce the synchronization cost between the threads of a job.
• The traditional UNIX file system management tools - comprising of mount, fsck, mkfs, stat are provided to manage the file system
• Traditional UNIX applications using file I/O runs successfully
  •Applications requiring high performance uses MPI2 interface
• Allows arbitrary lengths of scatter/gather lists of I/O buffers to avoid the packing and unpacking of buffers
• Allows partitioning of file among the job's threads, to reduce the need for synchronization and co-ordination during data access.