In order for I/O systems to achieve high performance in a parallel environment, they must either sacrifice client-side file caching, or keep caching and deal with complex coherency issues. The most common technique for dealing with cache coherency in multi-client file caching environments uses file locks to bypass the client-side cache. Aside from effectively disabling cache usage, file locking is sometimes unavailable on larger systems.

The high-level abstraction layer of MPI allows us to tackle cache coherency with additional information and coordination without using file locks. By approaching the cache coherency issue further up, the underlying I/O accesses can be modified in such a way as to ensure access to coherent data while satisfying the user?s I/O request. We can effectively exploit the benefits of a file system?s client-side cache while minimizing its management costs.