And eat it too: High read performance in write-optimized HPC I/O middleware file formats

As HPC applications run on increasingly high process counts on larger and larger machines, both the frequency of checkpoints needed for fault tolerance and the resolution and size of Data Analysis Dumps are expected to increase proportionally. In order to maintain an acceptable ratio of time spent performing useful computation work to time spent performing I/O, write bandwidth to the under-lying storage system must increase proportionally to this increase in the checkpoint and computation size. Unfortunately, popular scientific self-describing file formats such as netCDF and HDF5 are designed with a focus on portability and flexibility. Extra care and careful crafting of the output structure and API calls is required to optimize for write performance using these APIs.