Author: Lori Cooper

A few years ago, I was looking for a data format with low latency block and stream support. While protocol buffers offered streams, it was lacking indexed block access. Soon, I realized I was looking for a container with file system-like properties. When I examined HDF5, I found it was very close to what I needed to store massive financial engineering datasets...

The topic of software citation has been discussed in many forums recently and several major discovery repositories (e.g. zenodo and DataCite) support metadata for software in addition to datasets and other resource types. HDF5 stradles the boundary between the dataset and software worlds. It is most commonly thought of and referred to as a data format, but, as in any case, data written in the HDF formats can not be read without HDF software. So, the answer to the question: is it a format or is it software? is clearly both....

On March 30th, we announced the release of HDF5 version 1.10.2. With this release, we accomplished all the tasks planned for the major HDF5 1.10 series. It is time for applications to start migrating (or start their migration) from HDF5 1.8 to the new major release as we will be dropping support for HDF5 1.8 in Summer 2019. In this blog post , we will focus only on the major new features and bug fixes in HDF5 1.10.2. Hopefully, after reading about those, you will be convinced it is time to upgrade to HDF5 1.10.2....

The HDF5 1.10.2 release is now available for download from: https://www.hdfgroup.org/downloads/hdf5/ The source code (only) can also be obtained from: https://portal.hdfgroup.org/display/support/HDF5+1.10.2 User documentation for HDF5 1.10 can be accessed here: https://portal.hdfgroup.org/display/HDF5/...

  • 1