9212369 Reed We propose to develop a portable tool set to explore the design space for scalable input/output systems. This tool set will take the form of a user-level input library that will be portable across several parallel systems, permitting a wide range of experimentation with modest human resources. These input/output libraries will be invoked by user input/output calls and will rely on the underlying system software for physical input/output. Interposing the libraries between the application and the system software will allow us to quickly experiment with a variety of data distribution and data management algorithms. For example, local read ahead and write behind policies could be implemented in the user-level library. Alternatively, we could explore coordinated global prefetching policies coupled with distributed caching.
