CPU speeds are increasing at a much faster rate than secondary storage device speeds. Many important applications face an I/O bottleneck. We demonstrate that this bottleneck can be alleviated through 1) scalable striping of data and 2) caching/prefetching techniques. This paper describes the design and performance of the Tower of Pizzas (TOPs), a portable software system providing parallel I/O and buffering services. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-52)