Introduction

This document describes the design and use of the Buffered Message Interface (BMI). BMI is a network abstraction layer that will form the basis for communication between components of the Parallel Virtual File System Version 2. It is a simple message oriented communications library that includes features that are particularly useful for low level parallel I/O operations.

All request protocol messages exchanged between clients and servers in PVFS2 will be transferred using BMI.

Actual file data transferred in PVFS2 will be sent using the flow interface (see related documents). The default flow implementation will also use BMI as an underlying transport, but advanced implementations may elect to bypass it.