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The Vesta parallel file system provides parallel access from compute nodes to files distributed across I/O nodes in a massively parallel computer. Vesta is intended to solve the I/O problems of massively parallel computers executing numerically intensive scientific applications. Vesta has three interesting characteristics: First, it provides a user defined parallel view of file data, and allows user defined partitioning and repartitioning of files without moving data among I/O nodes. The parallel file access semantics of Vesta directly support the operations required by parallel language I/O libraries. Second, Vesta is scalable to a very large number (many hundreds) of I/O and compute nodes and does not contain any sequential bottlenecks in the data-access path. Third, it provides user-directed checkpointing of files during continuing program execution with very little processing overhead.