  Today's cluster computers suffer from slow I/O, which slows down
I/O-intensive applications. We show that fast disk I/O can be achieved by
operating a parallel file system over fast networks such as Myrinet or Gigabit
Ethernet.
  In this paper, we demonstrate how the ParaStation3 communication system helps
speed-up the performance of parallel I/O on clusters using the open source
parallel virtual file system (PVFS) as testbed and production system. We will
describe the set-up of PVFS on the Alpha-Linux-Cluster-Engine (ALiCE) located
at Wuppertal University, Germany. Benchmarks on ALiCE achieve
write-performances of up to 1 GB/s from a 32-processor compute-partition to a
32-processor PVFS I/O-partition, outperforming known benchmark results for PVFS
on the same network by more than a factor of 2. Read-performance from
buffer-cache reaches up to 2.2 GB/s. Our benchmarks are giant, I/O-intensive
eigenmode problems from lattice quantum chromodynamics, demonstrating stability
and performance of PVFS over Parastation in large-scale production runs.
