An application-level parallel I/O library for Earth system models
John M. Dennis, Jim Edwards, Ray Loy, Robert Jacob, ARTHUR A. MIRIN, Anthony P Craig, Mariana Vertenstein · The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications · 2011
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 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.