From: File Systems

This discussion comes up occassionally on comp.arch and
comp.os.research. I don't know which newsgroups/mailing lists the PIO
(Parallel I/O) people hang out in, but it doesn't seem to be here.
They show up occassionally in comp.sys.super and comp.parallel.  They
do have their own conferences, though.

The important work seems to be going on with the supercomputing gang
-- LLNL, CMU, Caltech, UIUC, Dartmouth, ORNL, SNL, etc. Work is also
being done by the parallel database community, including vendors such
as Teradata.

A paper presented at the ACM International Supercomputing Conference
in 1993 showed what to me seemed to be pretty appalling performance
for reading data and distributing it to multiple processors on an
Intel Delta supercomputer (sorry I don't have the reference in front
of me). (rdv, 94/8/12) The paper is old, now, and the Intel guys say
they have improved performance to up to 130 MB/sec. on the new Paragon
using their Parallel File System (PFS).

There is an excellent web site on parallel I/O at Dartmouth:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/pario.html

There is also a mailing list housed at Dartmouth,
parallel-io@dartmouth.edu.

The annual conference is I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems
(IOPADS); 1997's is co-located with Supercomputing '97 in San Jose,
Nov. 17.  Papers are due March 25, 1997.  See
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/iopads.