Author: Jim Edwards; John M. Dennis; Mariana Vertenstein; Edward Hartnett

The Parallel IO libraries (PIO) are high-level parallel I/O C and Fortran libraries for structured grid applications. PIO provides a netCDF-like API, and allows users to designate some subset of processors to perform IO. Computational code calls netCDF-like functions to read and write data, and PIO uses the IO processors to perform all necessary IO.

PIO also supports the creation of multiple computation components, each containing many processors, and one shared set of IO processors. The computational components can perform write operation asynchronously, and the IO processors will take care of all storage interaction.

This user's guide provides information about the PIO library and examples on how it can be used. Please watch the PIO GitHub site [https://github.com/NCAR/ParallelIO] for announcements and new releases.