244 High Performance Parallel I/O
20.4.1 Data Model and Versioning
One of the biggest strengths of HDF5 is that the data model lies in the file.
What is more important, there is forward and backward compatibility with
files generated by the library. This allows a very flexible view of the data when
considering parallel access to the file. As a rule of thumb, programs should
use the HDF5 format to store data that other programs should read. The
common data model is stored in the file and it is easy to explore and consume.
For simulation data, this is crucial as it allows different access patterns to be
implemented. Each program can access the same data without sharing the
same business. Furthermore, the same program between versions can freely
change its