About Us

Our Company

Developing software to address your needs and advance innovation in data management.

The HDF Group is a non-profit organization with the mission of advancing state-of-the-art open-source data management technologies, ensuring long-term access to the data, and supporting our dedicated and diverse user community. We do this by providing high-quality software that addresses user needs and takes advantage of innovations in data management. The HDF Group is the developer of HDF5® software, which includes a high-performance software library, data format, and a highly scalable data service, adopted across multiple industries and is the de facto standard in the scientific and research community.

Our Story

In 1987, the Graphics Foundations Task Force at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign set out to create an architecture-independent software library and file format to address the need to share scientific data among the many different computing platforms in use at NCSA at that time. In 2006, The HDF Group was created as a 501(c)3 non-profit company. And the rest is history…

The Early Years

1985 to 1998

The Middle Years

1998 to 2005

The Future

2006 to present