@MastersThesis{ramachandran:msthesis,
  author = {Harish Ramachandran},
  title = {Design and implementation of the system interface for {PVFS2}},
  year = {2002},
  month = {December},
  school = {Clemson University},
  URL = {ftp://ftp.parl.clemson.edu/pub/techreports/2002/PARL-2002-008.ps},
  keywords = {pvfs, parallel file system, system interface, pario-bib},
  abstract = {As Linux clusters emerged as an alternative to traditional
  supercomputers one of the problems faced was the absence of a
  high-performance parallel file system comparable to the file systems on the
  commercial machines. The Parallel Virtual FileSystem(PVFS) developed at
  Clemson University has attempted to address this issue. PVFS is a parallel
  file system currently used in Parallel I/O research and as a parallel file
  system on Linux clusters running high-performance parallel applications. \par
  An important component of parallel file systems is the file system interface
  which has different requirements compared to the normal UNIX interface
  particularly the I/O interface. A parallel I/O interface is required to
  provide support for non-contiguous access patterns, collective I/O, large
  file sizes in order to achieve good performance with parallel applications.
  As it supports significantly different functionality, the interface exposed
  by a parallel file system assumes importance. So, the file system needs to
  either directly provide a parallel I/O interface or at the least support for
  such an interface to be implemented on top. \par The PVFS2 System Interface
  is the native file system interface for PVFS2 - the next generation of PVFS.
  The System Interface provides support for multiple interfaces such as a POSIX
  interface or a parallel I/O interface like MPI-IO to access PVFS2 while also
  allowing the benefits of abstraction by decoupling the System Interface from
  the actual file system implementation. This document discusses the design and
  implementation of the System Interface for PVFS2.}
}