As we enter the "decade of data," the disparity between the vast amount of data storage capacity (measurable in terabytes and petabytes) and the bandwidth available for accessing it has created an input/output bottleneck that is proving to be a major constraint on the effective use of scientific data for research. Scalable Input/Output is a summary of the major research results of the Scalable I/O Initiative, launched by Paul Messina, then Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, to explore software and algorithmic solutions...

Foreword by Bjarne Stroustrup Software is generally acknowledged to be the single greatest obstacle preventing mainstream adoption of massively-parallel computing. While sequential applications are routinely ported to platforms ranging from PCs to mainframes, most parallel programs only ever run on one type of machine. One reason for this is that most parallel programming systems have failed to insulate their users from the architectures of the machines on which they have run. Those that have been platform-independent have usually also had poor performance.Many researchers now believe that...