Bridge: a high performance file system for parallel processors

Dibble, Peter; Scott, Michael L.; Ellis, Carla Schlatter

doi:10.1109/dcs.1988.12513

Cited by 45 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Selectively revealing this parallel structure to utility programs can produce additional improvements, particularly on machines in which interprocessor communication is slow compared to aggregate I/O bandwidth. The Bridge parallel file system [18] distributes each file across multiple storage devices and pro cessors. The approach is based on the notion of an interleaved file, in which consecutive logical blocks are assigned to different physical nodes.…”

Section: Operating Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-scale parallel programming: experience with BBN butterfly parallel processor

LeBlanc

Scott

Brown

1988

Proceedings of the ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Parallel Programming: Experience With Applications, Languages and Systems

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For three years, members of the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester have used a collection of BBN ButterftyTM Parallel Processors to conduct research in parallel sys tems and applications. For most of that time, Rochester's 128-node machine has had the distinc tion of being the largest shared-memory multiprocessor in the world. In the course of our work with the Butterfly we have ported three compilers, developed five major and several minor library packages, built two different operating systems, and implemented dozens of applications. Our experience clearly demonstrates the practicality of large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors, with non-uniform memory access times. It also demonstrates that the problems inherent in pro gramming such machines are far from adequately solved. Both locality and Amdahl's law become increasingly important with a very large number of nodes. The availability of multiple programming models is also a concern; truly general-purpose parallel computing will require the development of environments that allow programs written under different models to coexist and interact. Most important, there is a continuing need for high-quality programming tools; widespread acceptance of parallel machines will require the development of programming environments comparable to those available on sequential computers.

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Section: Operating Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-scale parallel programming: experience with BBN butterfly parallel processor

LeBlanc

Scott

Brown

1988

Proceedings of the ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Parallel Programming: Experience With Applications, Languages and Systems

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“…We have realized this approach in a prototype system called Bridge [4]. For applications in which I/O performance is critical, Bridge allows user-provided code to be incorporated into the file system at run time, so that arbitrary application-specific operations can be performed on the processors local to the data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond striping: the bridge multiprocessor file system

Dibble

Scott

1989

SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News

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High-performance parallel computers require high-performance file systems. Exotic I/O hardware will be of little use if file system software runs on a. single processor of a many-processor machine. We believe that cost-effective I/O for large multiprocessors can best be obtained by spreading both data and file system computation over a large number of processors and disks. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, we have implemented a prototype system called Bridge, and have studied its performance on several data intensive applications, among them external sorting. A detailed analysis of our sorting algorithm indicates that Bridge can profitably be used on configurations in excess of one hundred processors with disks. Empirical results on a 32-processor implementation agree with the analysis, providing us with a high degree of confidence in this prediction. Based on our experience, we argue that file systems such as Bridge will satisfy the I/O needs of a wide range of parallel architectures and applications.

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“…In order to build parallel applications with high I/O bandwidth requirements, multiprocessor file systems are needed, which decluster files over many disks [2,9,10,7,8,3]. Processes running on any of the available processors may independently access and process parts of the declustered file.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%