The particle cacher can save/load particles to/from disk.

It is necessary to cache your simulation particles to disk in order to correctly render your simulation with the NET renderer.
Simulations themselves can only be calculated on one machine.

The particle cacher also uses the Partio open source library (maintained by Disney) to load and save several other industry standard particle file formats which allow you to exchange your data with other 3D applications such as Maya, XSI, Houdini and more.