Patent Document ID: 7721009
Application ID: 11604162
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for implementing large scale parallel file input/output (I/O) processing; the method comprising steps of: separating processing nodes into compute nodes and I/O nodes, wherein compute nodes are computer processors specializing in computation and I/O nodes are computer processors restricted to running I/O daemons; organizing the compute nodes and the I/O nodes into processing sets, the processing sets comprising: one dedicated I/O node corresponding to a plurality of compute nodes, wherein the plurality of compute nodes are evenly distributed across participating processing sets; assigning compute nodes from each processing set to become I/O aggregators to issue I/O requests to their corresponding I/O node, wherein the I/O aggregators are evenly distributed across the processing set; partitioning a file domain using a collective buffering technique wherein data is aggregated in memory prior to writing to a file; assigning portions of the partitioned file domain to processing sets; receiving I/O related system calls in the compute nodes; sending the I/O related system calls to the corresponding I/O nodes; and processing the I/O related system calls through a system I/O daemon residing in the I/O node.