Parallel Access to Persistent Arrays from HPF Applications Peter Brezany and Viera Sipkova Multidimensional arrays are a fundamental data type in scientific computing. Such a code needs to access the secondary memory very frequently.
Similar support is provided for the implementation of time-step operations.
Array files extend the conventional file organization by means of metadata describing attributes of arrays, e.g. rank, shape and element type, in order to manipulate arbitrary sections of arrays. ViPIOS is designed as a stand-alone, independent runtime module to provide parallel applications with efficient transparent access to persistent arrays. The system applies a novel blackboard method based on AI technology to the distribution of arrays on disks and to the optimization of disk accesses and the communication scheme. Further it uses advanced buffering and prefetching algorithms to speed up the system performance. Arrays managed by Panda can be distributed both in memory and on disk.