The Computational Fluid Dynamics General Notation System provides a unified way in which computational fluid dynamics data can be stored, but does not support the parallel I/O capabilities now available from version five of the Hierarchical Data Format library which serves as a back end for the standard. To resolve this deficiency, a new parallel extension library has been written and benchmarked for this work which can write files compliant with the standard using parallel file access modes. When using this new library, the write performance shows an increase of fourfold in some cases when compared to the same hardware operating in serial. Additionally, the use of parallel I/O allows much larger cases to be written since the problem is scattered across many nodes of a cluster, whose aggregate memory is much greater than that found on a single machine. These developments will allow computational fluid dynamics simulations to execute faster, since less time will be spent waiting for each time step to finish writing, as well prevent the need for lengthy reconstruction of data after the completion of a simulation.
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