PVFS is a production-quality parallel file system for use on high-end computing platforms. Version 2 of PVFS is routinely deployed in production on both Linux cluster systems and on the IBM BG/L platform. Its design is modular, allowing support for new networks and storage devices as they become available.
Portals is a message passing interface intended to allow scalable, high-performace network communication between nodes of a parallel computing system. It finds use in the current Cray XT3 and XT4 machines.
This project added a direct Portals interface as one of the communication options in PVFS. Testing has been done on the Portals TCP emulation code, but not yet on a Cray system. The code has been contributed upstream to the PVFS distribution, under a LGPLv2 license.
A short technical report is available:
Forwarding IO with Portals in PVFS
Pete Wyckoff
OSC Technical Report, August 2007
Paper (PDF)
DoE funded a small project to port PVFS to Portals, the messaging layer used on Cray XT3 and XT4 platforms. Design, coding and testing on the TCP implementation of Portals has been completed successfully. PVFS compiles on the Cray platform, but we are struggling to find willing parties to let us test on their Cray systems. There is potential to extend the scope of the work plan to perform testing and performance characterization on large scale systems. This future work would benefit other I/O architectures on large scale systems as well.
Last updated 18 Sep 2007.