Toward a General I/O Layer for Parallel-Visualization Applications

For large-scale visualization applications, the visualization community urgently needs general solutions for efficient parallel I/O. These parallel visualization solutions should center around design patterns and the related data-partitioning strategies, not file formats. From this respect, it´s feasible to greatly alleviate I/O burdens without reinventing the wheel. For example, BIL (Block I/O Layer), which implements such a pattern, has greatly accelerated I/O performance for large-scale parallel particle tracing, a pervasive but challenging use case.