Augmenting PODIO Serialisation

PODIO, or plain-old-data I/O, is a C++ library to support the creation and handling of data models in particle physics. It is based on the idea of employing plain-old-data (POD) data structures wherever possible and avoiding deep-object hierarchies and virtual inheritance. This project tests the validation of serialisation/deserialisation of data from memory to/from disk for different I/O implementations. After the basic functionality is validated, the performance of these options is considered.