Numerical simulations conducted on current high-performance computing (HPC) systems face an ever growing need for scalability. Larger HPC platforms provide opportunities to push the limits on size and properties of what can be accurately simulated. Therefore, it is needed to process larger data sets, be it reading input data or writing results. Serial approaches on handling I/O in a parallel application will dominate the performance on massively parallel systems, as a lot of computing resources are idle during those serial application phases. In addition to the need for parallel I/O, input and output data is often processed on different platforms. Heterogeneity of platforms can impose a high level of maintenance, when different data representations are needed. Portable, self-describing data formats such as HDF5 and netCDF are examples of already widely used data formats within certain communities.

This course will introduce the use of parallel I/O (MPI I/O) and the HDF5 as well as the netCDF and the SIONlib library interfaces. Participants should have experience in parallel programming with MPI, and either C/C++ or Fortran in particular.

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