A flexible I/O framework for parallel and distributed systems

We propose a framework for I/O in parallel and distributed systems. The framework is highly customizable and extendible, and enables programmers to offer high level objects in their applications, without requiring them to struggle with the low level and sometimes complex details of high performance distributed I/O. Also, the framework exploits application specific information to improve I/O performance by allowing specialized programmers to customize the framework. Internally, we use indirection and granularity control to support migration, dynamic load balancing, fault tolerance, etc. for objects of the I/O system, including those representing application data