The performance of scientific parallel programs with high file-I/O-activity running on top of cluster computers strongly depends on the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the requested I/O-accesses. It also depends on the corresponding mechanisms and policies being used at the parallel file system level. This paper presents the motivation and design of a set of MPI-IO-hints. These hints are used to select the distribution function with which a parallel file system manipulates an opened file. The implementation of a new physical distribution function called varstrip_dist is also presented in this article. This function is proposed based upon spatial characteristics presented by I/O-access patterns observed at the application level

@inproceedings{HCDWPFSVL05,
	author	 = {Hipolito Vasquez and Thomas Ludwig},
	title	 = {{Hint Controlled Distribution with Parallel File Systems}},
	year	 = {2005},
	booktitle	 = {{Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface}},
	publisher	 = {Springer},
	address	 = {Berlin / Heidelberg, Germany},
	number	 = {3666},
	pages	 = {110--118},
	conference	 = {EuroPVM/MPI-05},
	location	 = {Sorrento, Italy},
	isbn	 = {978-3-540-29009-4},
	doi	 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11557265_18},
	abstract	 = {The performance of scientific parallel programs with high file-I/O-activity running on top of cluster computers strongly depends on the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the requested I/O-accesses. It also depends on the corresponding mechanisms and policies being used at the parallel file system level. This paper presents the motivation and design of a set of MPI-IO-hints. These hints are used to select the distribution function with which a parallel file system manipulates an opened file. The implementation of a new physical distribution function called varstrip_dist is also presented in this article. This function is proposed based upon spatial characteristics presented by I/O-access patterns observed at the application level},
	url	 = {http://www.springerlink.com/content/7vj2ftyav25xcwam/fulltext.pdf},
}