Noncontiguous I/O access is the main access pattern in many scientific applications. Noncontiguity exists both in access to files and in access to target memory regions on the client. This characteristic imposes a requirement of native noncontiguous I/O access support in cluster file systems for high performance. In this paper, we address noncontiguous data transmission between the client and the I/O server in cluster file systems over a high performance network.

We propose a novel approach, RDMA Gather/Scatter, to transfer noncontiguous data for such I/O accesses. We also propose a new scheme, Optimistic Group Registration, to reduce memory registration costs associated with this approach. We have designed and incorporated this approach in a version of PVFS over InfiniBand. Through a range of PVFS and MPI-IO micro-benchmarks, and the NAS BTIO benchmark, we demonstrate that our approach attains significant performance gains compared to other existing approaches.