TY - GEN A1 - Benger, Werner A1 - Hege, Hans-Christian A1 - Merzky, Andre A1 - Radke, Thomas A1 - Seidel, Edward T1 - Efficient Distributed File I/O for Visualization in Grid Environments N2 - Large scale simulations running in metacomputing environments face the problem of efficient file I/O. For efficiency it is desirable to write data locally, distributed across the computing environment, and then to minimize data transfer, i.e.\ reduce remote file access. Both aspects require I/O approaches which differ from existing paradigms. For the data output of distributed simulations, one wants to use fast local parallel I/O for all participating nodes, producing a single distributed logical file, while keeping changes to the simulation code as small as possible. For reading the data file as in postprocessing and file based visualization, one wants to have efficient partial access to remote and distributed files, using a global naming scheme and efficient data caching, and again keeping the changes to the postprocessing code small. However, all available software solutions require the entire data to be staged locally (involving possible data recombination and conversion), or suffer from the performance problems of remote or distributed file systems. In this paper we show how to interface the HDF5 I/O library via its flexible Virtual File Driver layer to the Globus Data Grid. We show, that combining these two toolkits in a suitable way provides us with a new I/O framework, which allows efficient, secure, distributed and parallel file I/O in a metacomputing environment. T3 - ZIB-Report - SC-99-43 KW - Grid KW - Data Grid KW - Globus KW - HDF5 KW - Cactus KW - CCTK KW - Amira KW - VFD KW - Storage Systems Y1 - 1999 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-4326 ER -