A Kind of Magic: Storing Computations in HDF5

The purpose of this introduction is to highlight and celebrate a community contribution the impact of which we are just beginning to understand. Its principal author, Mr. Lucas C. Villa Real, calls it HDF5-UDF and describes it as “a mechanism to generate HDF5 dataset values on-the-fly using user-defined functions (UDFs).” This matter- of-fact characterization is quite accurate, but I would like to provide some context for what this means for us users of HDF5.

Recent publications from The HDF Group

The HDF Group’s formal comment to a DOE request on stewardship for scientific and high-performance computing was published in the Federal Register. We had a joint position paper at January’s ASCR Workshop on Visualization for Scientific Discovery, Decision-Making, & Communication. The paper is called Whither Visualization Logic and was written by Leigh Orf (University of Wisconsin), Lucas Villa Real

BioSimulations: a platform for sharing and reusing biological simulations

The group at BioSimulations.org has been doing some very interesting work using HSDS on Kubernetes to store biomodelling data and visualizing the results using Vega as described in the paper below. Biosimulations chose to use HSDS due to its support for very large data sets,  REST API (for use with web applications), and its ability to run on Google Cloud as well as on-premise installations. 

Webinar Follow-up: Hermes 0.1.0-beta release

Hermes is a distributed I/O buffering system for deep distributed storage hierarchies, which are commonly found on modern HPC systems. On December 1st, 2021, members of the Hermes team gave a presentation to show Hermes in action, talk about the new release and plan for future development. Here are the materials from that session: Slide

HDF5 1.13.0: Introducing Experimental Releases

We are excited to announce a new strategy of delivering HDF5 features: Experimental Releases. Experimental releases allow us to get major new features into the hands of our users so that they can test the features and provide feedback before we integrate them into a subsequent maintenance release. Our first experimental release, HDF5 version 1.13.0, is now available.

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