The performance of parallel I/O operations is highly depen- dent on various parameters like disk transfer rates, speed of processor (network) interconnections, size of available memory for data buffers and so forth. Tuning of parallel I/O to achieve optimum performance is a very complex task for application programmers. This paper presents a method to perform I/O optimization automatically. The approach used is based on a combination of a blackboard system and an A* algorithm, which allows to achieve (near) optimal performance in reasonable time. The architecture of the blackboard is described in detail and illustrated on an example based on a simple cost model.