libMeshb: a Simple, Fast and Versatile Library to Handle HPC Meshes and Solutions With a Dedicated File Format

Problem statement: a full HPC toolchain is made of numerous pre/post-processing tools and solvers, all communicating with each other either through file-based I/O or in memory exchanges. The first solution is less invasive in terms of software development but requires lots of external libraries, components and knowledge to use them (i.e. MPIO, HDF5, GPFS, Lustre, CGNS). The latter is more invasive as internal data structures need to be adapted and exposed to the communication layer but is much faster both in terms of throughput and latency. Furthermore, most standard HPC I/O libraries and file formats have been developed in the time of spinning hard drives and fail to extract the full potential of today's SSDs. Solution: we propose a lightweight library made of a single C file, without external dependency aside the Linux kernel's async IO and pthreads, whose API is based on tables and scalars so it can be easily accessed from any kind of languages and that is inherently parallel and SSD-native.