What do you need to run Parallel HDF5?

You need an MPI library with MPI-I/O support installed on your system.

If you use the MPIO VFD, the HDF5 library will use MPI-I/O for data access so MPI-I/O must be supported by the file system.

If a different driver is used, such as the MPI POSIX VFD, then a POSIX compliant file system is required. (Two examples are Lustre and GPFS; NFS will not work since it is not POSIX compliant.)

Although not strictly required, a parallel file system is also needed to achieve good performance.