2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Introduction to NetCDF-4
11.9 NetCDF-4 Performance Improvements
NetCDF-4 uses HDF5 for its storage layer, which provides several ways to
improve performance, even for netCDF-3 programs.
- Per-variable compression
- Per-variable chunking (multidimensional tiling)
- Parallel-I/O (HDF5's, not Argonne's Parallel netCDF)
for platforms with parallel file systems
- "Reader makes right" rules
- Efficient dynamic schema changes
- Performance benefits for writers creating "classic model" files
- Performance benefits for netCDF-3 reader programs reading
"classic model" netCDF-4 (HDF5) files by
relinking with the netCDF-4 library
Early users of netCDF-4 have reported 4:1 compression and 7x speedups
for model data storage and access.
2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Introduction to NetCDF-4
