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A significant challenge on an exascale computer is the speed at which we compute results exceeds by many orders of magnitude the speed at which we save these results. Therefore the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) ALPINE project focuses on providing exascale-ready visualization solutions including in situ processing. In situ visualization and analysis runs as the simulation is run, on simulations results are they are generated avoiding the need to save entire simulations to storage for later analysis. The ALPINE project made post hoc visualization tools, ParaView and VisIt, exascale ready and developed in situ algorithms and infrastructures. The suite of ALPINE algorithms developed under ECP includes novel approaches to enable automated data analysis and visualization to focus on the most important aspects of the simulation. Many of the algorithms also provide data reduction benefits to meet the I/O challenges at exascale. ALPINE developed a new lightweight in situ infrastructure, Ascent. 

Array management libraries, such as HDF5, Zarr, etc., depend on a complex software stack that consists of parallel I/O middleware (MPI-IO), POSIX-IO, and file systems. Components in the stack are interdependent, such that effort in tuning the parameters in these software libraries for optimal performance is non-trivial. On the other hand, it is challenging to choose an array management library based on the array configuration and access patterns. In this poster, we investigate the performance aspect of two array management libraries, i.e., HDF5 and Zarr, in the context of a neuroscience use case. We highlight the performance variability of HDF5 and Zarr in our preliminary results and discuss potential optimization strategies.