Cyclic allocation of two-dimensional data

Various proposals have been made for declustering 2D tiled data on multiple I/O devices. Strictly optimal solutions only exist under very restrictive conditions on the tiling of the 2D space or for very few I/O devices. In this paper, we explore allocation methods where no strictly optimal solution exists. We propose a general class of allocation methods, referred to as cyclic allocation methods, and show that many existing methods are instances of this class. As a result, various seemingly ad hoc and unrelated methods are presented in a single framework. Furthermore, the framework is used to develop new allocation methods that give better performance than any previous method and that approach the best feasible performance.