NetCDF performance and installation

NEMO uses netCDF files for both its input and output data. NetCDF stands for network Common Data Form and is a set of interfaces, data formats and software libraries which help read and write scientific data files. Further information on netCDF can be found in [3,4]. The netCDF libraries allow scientific data to be represented in a machine independent and thus portable format.

NEMO currently uses version 3.6.2 of netCDF. The new release of netCDF (netCDF 4.0) allows HDF5 files to be accessed and also includes parallel I/O capabilities. The first stable release version of netCDF 4.0 became available on 29/06/2008 and as of 23/03/2009 the latest version is 4.0.1-beta3. Below we describe the installation of the stable release which contains all the necessary functionality required for NEMO. Some additional installation and porting details can be found at:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/netcdf-install/

Prior to installing netCDF 4.0 both zlib version 1.2.3 or higher and HDF5 version 1.8.1 must be installed as these are prerequisites of netCDF 4.0. The installation of zlib, HDF5 and netCDF 4.0 will be described in sections  8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 respecitvely. The next section gives some performance details relating to netCDF 3.6.2.