A Windows-Based Parallel File System

Parallel file systems are widely used in clusters to provide high performance I/O. However, most of the existing parallel file systems are based on UNIX-like operating systems. The authors use the Microsoft .NET framework to implement a parallel file system for Windows. They also implement a file system driver to support existing applications written with Win32 APIs. In addition, a preliminary MPI-IO library is also developed. Applications using MPI-IO could achieve the best performance using the parallel file system, while the existing binaries could benefit from the system driver without any modifications. In this paper, the design and implementation of the system are described.