Recommendations for developing portable parallel I/O facilities forscientific applications

We outline a plan to develop portable parallel I/O facilities for scientific applications on parallel computers. We recommend that efforts be focussed on three areas: a new standard I/O library for message passing environments, efficient parallel I/O implementations for data parallel programming in Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran (which may require new parallel I/O commands), and the promotion of high performance parallel I/O facilities in high-level scientific toolkits. In the next year we will concentrate primarily on the first area, designing and implementing a portable parallel I/O library to work with the new MPI standard Message Passing Interface