MPI-2 file format options

I am trying to speed up my file I/O using MPI-2, but there doesn't appear to be any way to read/write formatted files. Many of my I/O files are formatted for ea开发者_StackOverflow社区se of pre and post-processing.

Any suggestions for an MPI-2 solution for formatted I/O?

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The usual answer to using MPI-IO while generating some sort of portable, sensible file format is to use HDF5 or NetCDF4 . There's a real learning curve to both (but also lots of tutorials out there) but the result is you hve portable, self-describing files that there are a zillion tools for accessing, manipulating, etc.

If by `formatted' output you mean plain human-readable text, then as someone who does a lot of this stuff, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't urge you enough to start moving away from that approach. We all by and large start that way, dumping plain text so we can quickly see what's going on; but it's just not a good approach for doing production runs. The files are bloated, the I/O is way slower (I routinely see 6x slowdown in using ascii as vs binary, partly because you're writing out small chunks at a time and partly because of the string conversions), and for what? If there's so little data being output that you actually can feasibly read and understand the output, you don't need parallel I/O; if there are so many numbers that you can't really plausibly flip through them all and understand what's going on, then what's the point?