Parallel I/O continues to be a topic of active development. Recent years have seen the creation of many new options. Even with these new choices, certain factors remain constant. Parallel applications need a fast I/O subsystem. Clusters need a parallel file system that can scale as the number of nodes increases to the thousands and tens of thousands.

PVFS (Parallel Virtual File System) serves as both a platform for I/O research, and a production file system for the cluster computing community.