PDS/PIO: Lightweight libraries for collective parallel I/O

PDS/PIO is a lightweight, parallel interface designed to support efficient transfers of massive, grid-based, simulation data among memory, disk, and tape subsystems. The higher-level PDS (Parallel Data Set) interface manages data with tensor and unstructured grid abstractions, while the lower-level PIO (Parallel Input/Output) interface accesses data arrays with arbitrary permutation, and provides communication and collective I/O operations. Higher-level data abstraction for finite element applications is provided by PXI (Parallel Exodus Interface), which supports, in parallel, functionality of Exodus II, a finite element data model developed at Sandia National Laboratories. The entire interface is implemented in C with Fortran-callable PDS and PXI wrappers.