Parallel NETCDF is an implementation of the Network Common Data Form which supports parallel I/O. An excellent summary of the advantages are described by Choudhary, Liao, Gao, and Li.

Installation is fairly trivial. Download the tarball from the site, extract, load some modules, configure for the appropriate site, make and make install, and create modules. For example;


wget http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/parallel-netcdf/parallel-netcdf-1.2.0.tar.bz2
tar xvjf parallel-netcdf-1.2.0.tar.bz2
module load openmpi/1.4.3-gcc
cd parallel-netcdf-1.2.0
mkdir -p /usr/local/pnetcdf/1.2.0-gcc
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/pnetcdf/1.2.0-gcc --with-mpi=/usr/local/openmpi/1.4.3-gcc/
make
make install
cd /usr/local/Modules/modulefiles/pnetcdf
ln -s .base 1.2.0-gcc


Repeat for Intel and PGI compilers.