title: How do I use parallel I/O with netCDF-4?
body: <p>I would like to read and write from a single netCDF-4 file from R. The file will be accessed by many nodes processes at the same time, (~100's for development, ~1000's for production).</p>
  
  <p>What is the best way to access parallel I/O features in netCDF from within R?</p>
  
  <p>What I have found:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>It appears from the Unidata page that all I need to do is compile with parallel features enabled (<code>--enable-parallel</code>). Is that really all I need to do?</li>
  <li>I can not find any mention of parallel io in the ncdf4 package description.</li>
  <li>Given that I/O is the bottleneck in my computation, any hints on how to optimize my computation - are there circumstances when it would be better to write to multiple files during computation (e.g., locally), and combine the files later (e.g. using <a href="http://nco.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">nco</a>)?</li>
  </ul>