@InProceedings{ligon:pfs,
  author = {W. B. Ligon and R. B. Ross},
  title = {Implementation and Performance of a Parallel File System for High
  Performance Distributed Applications},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Symposium on High
  Performance Distributed Computing},
  year = {1996},
  month = {August},
  pages = {471--480},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society Press},
  URL =
  {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org:80/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isNumber=11475&page=3},
  keywords = {parallel I/O, cluster computing, parallel file system,
  pario-bib},
  abstract = {Dedicated cluster parallel computers (DCPCs) are emerging as
  low-cost high performance environments for many important applications in
  science and engineering. A significant class of applications that perform
  well on a DCPC are coarse-grain applications that involve large amounts of
  file I/O. Current research in parallel file systems for distributed systems
  is providing a mechanism for adapting these applications to the DCPC
  environment. We present the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), a system
  that provides disk striping across multiple nodes in a distributed parallel
  computer and file partitioning among tasks in a parallel program. PVFS is
  unique among similar systems in that it uses a stream-based approach that
  represents each file access with a single set of request parameters and
  decouples the number of network messages from details of the file striping
  and partitioning. PVFS also provides support for efficient collective file
  accesses and allows overlapping file partitions. We present results of early
  performance experiments that show PVFS achieves excellent speedups in
  accessing moderately sized file segments.}
}