Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of an application level parallel I/O (PIO) library for the reading and writing of distributed arrays to several common scientific data formats. PIO provides the flexibility to control the number of I/O tasks through data rearrangement to an I/O friendly d... Show moreWe describe the design and implementation of an application level parallel I/O (PIO) library for the reading and writing of distributed arrays to several common scientific data formats. PIO provides the flexibility to control the number of I/O tasks through data rearrangement to an I/O friendly decomposition. This flexibility enables reductions in per task memory usage and improvements in disk I/O performance versus a serial I/O approach. We illustrate the impact various features within PIO have on memory usage and disk I/O bandwidth on a Cray XT5 system. Show less