Unidata

• Used properly, parallel I/O allows users to overcome I/O bottlenecks in high performance computing environments.
• A parallel I/O file system is required for much improvement in I/O throughput.
• NetCDF-4 (and pNetCDF) work with the Message Passing Interface, version 2 (MPI2). There are many software libraries which support MPI2. Any supercomputer will have some MPI2 library.
• Other methods of parallelism are not supported by netCDF.
• Parallel I/O can be developed on a Linux workstation, and parallel performace gains can be seen on multi-core machines. Machines will hundreds of processors can be simulated.
• For netCDF testing we use the MPICH2 library.

2009 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Parallel I/O with NetCDF