In this project, an extensible and portable framework for a file system to make high-level I/O operations feasible is developed and implemented. The project evaluates the policies and mechanism using both analytical models and simulations of a variety of parallel architectures. Massively parallel computations on today's parallel computers are limited by their file systems. The performance of the file and disk systems can be improved by clever hardware and software support. I/O performance can be improved by making it possible for the programmer to specify I/O request at a high level. This is similar to how the matrix operations in many parallel languages specify the required semantics of high level operations to compilers, such that the compilers, run-time systems, operating system and the hardware coordinate the I/O to optimize the number and the order of accesses to disks, usage of buffers, layout of files on disks, and so on. These techniques of specifying at higher level can be generalized to other forms of I/O like the network I/O.
