Common Component Architecture
Data exchange between parallel components, or MxN communication, can currently be achieved by using one of several available technologies, like CUMULVS or PAWS. As part of the Common Component Architecture research at IU, we have developed a new virtual file system for ROMIO, an implementation of MPI-IO from Argonne National Laboratory that allows the clients to transfer parallel data directly using the MPI-IO interface. Applications currently using MPI-IO for input/output of files can be connected immediately by relinking with the modified ROMIO library, without any modification to the source code. Applications can then switch from writing the file to a regular file system to sending it, in parallel, to a remote application by changing the file name.