openPMD - An Open Standard for Particle-Mesh Data Files

Data fuels and substantiates scientific discoveries. Advanced particle accelerator research is no different and has an inherent need for high-rate, high-resolution data. But in recent years, generating and handling the sheer amount data that is driving our discoveries became challenging. Just to name a few: scalable output from 3D simulations breaks down for modern supercomputers, high-rate Mpixel cameras generate GByte/s for laser control and comparing even just simulations to each other is a significant, manual, error-prone process.

We present our open standard for particle and mesh based data, addressing these and more common challenges in our community. Based on state-of-the-art file formats and I/O libraries, we implement and improve scalable I/O without loosing self-description. openPMD is portable, truly self-describing, documented, forward-updatable and makes data comparable and reproducible.

openPMD tries to follow best-practices towards an open-science workflow. While the meta standard is developed in an open, reviewable, versioned technical document, a large collection of tools and bindings develop around it. We will take a look at the community that fuels openPMD, the open-source projects evolving around it, adopters in the domain of astro-physics, photon-science and classical accelerator physics and the latest updates arriving in openPMD 2.0.0 .