The Design of the Expand Parallel File System

Abstract

This article describes an implementation of MPI-IO using a new parallel file system, called Expand (Expandable Parallel File System), which is based on NFS servers. Expand combines multiple NFS servers to create a distributed partition where files are striped. Expand requires no changes to the NFS server and uses RPC operations to provide parallel access to the same file. Expand is also independent of the clients, because all operations are implemented using RPC and NFS protocols. Using this system, we can join heterogeneous servers (Linux, Solaris, Windows 2000, etc.) to provide a parallel and distributed partition. The article describes the design, implementation and evaluation of Expand with MPI-IO. This evaluation has been made in Linux clusters and compares Expand and PVFS.