MPI-IO: Difference between revisions

'''MPI-IO''' is a family of [[MPI]] routines that makes it possible to do file read and write operations in parallel. MPI-IO is a part of the MPI-2 standard. The main advantage of MPI-IO is that it allows, in a simple and efficient fashion, to read and to write data that is partitioned on multiple processes, to one file that is common to all processes. This is particularly useful when the manipulated data are vectors or matrices that are cut up in a structured manner between the different processes involved. This page gives a few guidelines on the use of MPI-IO and some references to more complete documentation.

Using views, each process can ''see'' a section of the file, as if it were the entire file. In this way it is no longer necessary to compute the file offsets as a function of the process rank. Once the view is defined, it is then a lot simpler to perform operations on this file, without risking conflicts with operations performed by other processes. A view is defined using the function [http://www.open-mpi.org/doc/current/man3/MPI_File_set_view.3.php MPI_File_set_view]. Here is a program identical to the previous example, but using views instead.