ADIO is designed such that it can exploit the high-performance features of any file system, and any API can be expressed in terms of ADIO. We designed ADIO by first studying the interface and functionality provided by different parallel file systems and high-level libraries and then deciding how the functionality could be supported at the ADIO level portably and efficiently.
For portability and high performance, ADIO uses MPI [16] wherever possible. Therefore, ADIO routines have MPI datatypes and communicators as arguments. We describe the ADIO interface in the following subsections.