CGNS Tag

Quincey Koziol, The HDF Group

“A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.” – Ken Batcher, Prof. Emeritus, Kent State University.

HDF5 began out of a collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC), so high-performance computing (HPC) I/O has been in our focus from the very beginning.  As we are starting our 20th year of development on HDF5, HPC I/O continues to be a critical driver of new features.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, each capable of performing more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. Here, ASC is examining the effects of a one-megaton nuclear energy source detonated on the surface of an asteroid. Image from ASC at http://www.lanl.gov/asci/

The HDF5 development team has focused on three things when serving the HPC community: performance, freedom of choice and ease of use.