We present a comprehensive survey on parallel I/O in the high performance computing (HPC) context. This is an important field for HPC because of the historic gap between processing power and storage latencies, which causes applications performance to be impaired when accessing or generating large amounts of data. As the available processing power and amount of data increase, I/O remains a central issue for the scientific community. In this survey, we focus on a traditional I/O stack, with a

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... X parallel file system. We present background concepts everyone could benefit from. Moreover, through the comprehensive study of publications from the most important conferences and journals in a five-year time window, we discuss the state of the art of I/O optimization approaches, access pattern extraction techniques, and performance modeling, in addition to general aspects of parallel I/O research. Through this approach, we aim at identifying the general characteristics of the field and the main current and future research topics.