@PhdThesis{oldfield:2003:thesis, author = {Ron Oldfield}, title = {Efficient {I/O} for Computational Grid Applications}, year = {2003}, month = {May}, school = {Dept. of Computer Science, Dartmouth College}, note = {Available as Dartmouth Computer Science Technical Report TR2003-459.}, later = {oldfield:2003:thesis-tr}, keywords = {parallel I/O, Grid computing, pario-bib}, abstract = {High-performance computing increasingly occurs on ``computational grids'' composed of heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems of computers, networks, and storage devices that collectively act as a single ``virtual'' computer. A key challenge in this environment is to provide efficient access to data distributed across remote data servers. This dissertation explores some of the issues associated with I/O for wide-area distributed computing and describes an I/O system, called Armada, with the following features: a framework to allow application and dataset providers to flexibly compose graphs of processing modules that describe the distribution, application interfaces, and processing required of the dataset before or after computation; an algorithm to restructure application graphs to increase parallelism and to improve network performance in a wide-area network; and a hierarchical graph-partitioning scheme that deploys components of the application graph in a way that is both beneficial to the application and sensitive to the administrative policies of the different administrative domains. Experiments show that applications using Armada perform well in both low- and high-bandwidth environments, and that our approach does an exceptional job of hiding the network latency inherent in grid computing.} } % BibTeX bibliography file