1. A method for storing at least one file generated by a distributed application in a parallel computing system, wherein said file comprises a plurality of sub-files, said method comprising the steps of: obtaining a user specification of semantic information related to said file; determining semantically meaningful sub-file boundaries for said plurality of sub-files based on said semantic information; providing said semantic information as a data structure description to a data formatting library write function, wherein said semantic information is dependent upon a content of said file; and storing said semantic information related to said file with additional metadata related to said file and with one or more of said sub-files using said determined semantically meaningful sub-file boundaries in one or more storage nodes of said parallel computing system.