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Rob, I concur with Mike Folk in welcoming your generous offer to collaborate on this project and share ideas. On a related subject, do you think your current parallel netCDF is in a state that could be disclosed to users who are currently encountering I/O bottlenecks with netCDF on parallel platforms? Even though it's not a 1.0 release version yet, I think there are others who would like to know about it and might be able to help in providing feedback about its usefulness. When you think it's ready for testing/evaluation by some friendly users, I suggest either announcing it to the address@hidden mailing list or providing a brief entry for the "What's New with netCDF?" page at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/whatsnew.html In either case, I'd be happy to assist in getting the news out about your parallel interface. I remember getting some very insightful bug fixes from Jianwei Li last year: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/aglimpse/70?query=Jianwei+Li&case=on&errors=0&maxfiles=10 that we have since incorporated into our netCDF 3.5.1beta10 release, and learning about this project clears up the mystery about how he found those bugs! --Russ _____________________________________________________________________ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://my.unidata.ucar.edu >Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 15:36:37 -0600 (CST) >From: Rob Ross <address@hidden> >To: Mike Folk <address@hidden>, <address@hidden> >cc: Robert Latham <address@hidden>, Rajeev Thakur <address@hidden>, > William Gropp <address@hidden>, Alok Choudhary <address@hidden>, > Wei-keng Liao <address@hidden> >Subject: netCDF4 announcement > >Mike, all, > >We at MCS and NWU are really excited to hear that an effort has been >funded to enhance netCDF's parallel I/O capabilities and to leverage the >work on HDF5 in that process [1]. > >We've been working in a similar direction ourselves to provide a new >interface more amenable to parallel I/O while retaining the netCDF file >format. We have a prototype implementation of this, and preliminary >performance numbers have been quite good. We attribute this mainly to >what we think is a solid interface for parallel access that maintains the >spirit of the netCDF API while providing the expressiveness necessary to >leverage parallel I/O semantics underneath. A web page describing this >work, including a document describing the API, is available at: > >http://www.mcs.anl.gov/parallel-netcdf > >We would very much like to contribute to your new effort, if possible, >rather than duplicating effort. We have had good success working with the >HDF5 team before, and we hope that this is another occasion on which we >can share ideas. > >We look forward to hearing back from you! > >Rob >--- >Rob Ross, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Lab > >[1] http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/proposals/NASA-AIST-2002/abstract.html