@TechReport{huber:ppfs-tr,
  author = {Jay Huber and Christopher L. Elford and Daniel A. Reed and Andrew
  A. Chien and David S. Blumenthal},
  title = {{PPFS}: A High Performance Portable Parallel File System},
  year = {1995},
  month = {January},
  number = {UIUCDCS-R-95-1903},
  institution = {University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign},
  later = {huber:ppfs},
  URL = {http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/Papers/PPFS-TR.html},
  keywords = {parallel file system, pario-bib},
  abstract = {Rapid increases in processor performance over the past decade
  have outstripped performance improvements in input/output devices, increasing
  the importance of input/output performance to overall system performance.
  Further, experience has shown that the performance of parallel data
  management policies, making good choices critical. To explore this vast
  design space, we have developed a user-level library, the Portable Parallel
  File System (PPFS), which supports rapid experimentation and exploration. The
  PPFS includes a rich application interface, allowing the application to
  advertise access patterns, control caching and prefetching, and even control
  data placement. PPFS is both extensible and portable, making possible a wide
  range of experiments on a broad variety of platforms and configurations. Our
  initial experiments, based on on simple benchmarks and two application
  programs, show that tailoring policies to input/output access patterns yields
  significant performance benefits, often improving performance by nearly an
  order of magnitude.},
  comment = {They have built a user-level library that implements a parallel
  file system on top of a set of vanilla Unix file systems. Their goals include
  flexibility and portability, so they can use PPFS to explore issues in
  parallel I/O. They allow the application to have lots of control over data
  distribution, cache and prefetch policies, etc. They support fixed- and
  variable-length records. They support client, server, and shared caches. This
  TR includes syntax and specs for all functions. They include performance for
  synthetic benchmarks and application codes, compared with Intel Paragon PFS
  (which is admittedly not a very tough competitor).}
}