1. UPC Parallel I/O Library

2. Application Needs Efficient thread access to files in parallel for
Reading/Writing data (collectively, independently)
Scratch pads
Out-of-core computations
Logs and check-pointing
Access by each thread to non-contiguous data objects in file
Other?

3. A Preliminary Proposal for UPC Parallel I/O API
Maintains C/Unix file view, sequence of bytes
Leverages C/Unix I/O syntax for open, read, write, fopen, fread, .. etc.
Leverages UPC data types (e.g. blocked shared arrays under the UPC memory model) to define which thread reads or write which data
Many other issues are still open

4. Plan of Attack
Finish Parallel I/O survey and Develop Requirement (April)
Complete the current proposal (April)
Review the proposal in light of Parallel I/O APIs, such as MPI-IO and PFS, and the UPC collective operations group

5. Plan of Attack cont. Consider synchronous and asynchronous accesses
Shared and private file pointers for coordinated and independent accesses
Synchronization worked out
Should we support variable length records? This may be tricky