Dynamically Adaptable I/O Semantics for High Performance Computing

While an input/output (I/O) interface’s syntax describes the available operations, its semantics determines how these operations behave and which assumptions developers can make about them. There are several different interface standards in existence, some of them dating back decades and having been designed for local file systems; one such representative is POSIX. Many parallel distributed file systems implement a POSIX-compliant interface to improve portability. All currently available interfaces follow a fixed approach regarding semantics, making them only suitable for a subset of use cases and workloads. While the interfaces do not allow application developers to influence the I/O semantics, applications could benefit greatly from the possibility of being able to adapt them to their requirements.