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Nov
14
2022

HDF5 can be built using two build systems: the Autotools (since HDF5 1.0) and CMake (since HDF5 1.8.5). For a long time, the Autotools were better maintained and CMake was more of an "alternative" build system that we primarily used for handling Windows support (the legacy Visual Studio projects were removed in HDF5 1.8.11). This is no longer the case though—CMake support in HDF5 is (almost) as good as Autotools support and CMake, in general, is much more commonly used now than when we first introduced it. So why are we still hanging on to the legacy Autotools?...

Oct
31
2022

John Readey, The HDF Group Before there was HSDS, there was h5serv. Released in 2015, h5serv was the first implementation of the HDF Rest API. Designed mainly as a way to demonstrate the RESTful interface for HDF, h5serv had a fairly simple implementation: A single threaded application that on receiving an HTTP request, made the equivalent HDF5 library call and converted the result to a JSON response which was returned to the client. Though useful for some applications, in the context of building a scalable web service, there were limitations with this approach. Since there was only one process in the h5serv application, each HTTP request had to be completely processed before handling the next one. This made it quite easy to...

Oct
19
2022

Dana Robinson has been appointed as the new Director of Engineering at The HDF Group. Dana started at The HDF Group in 2009 as a software engineer until stepping into the role of interim Director of Engineering in April 2022. As the Director of Engineering, Dana will lead the team of software engineers and shape the engineering culture, including developing the roadmap for HDF5 releases. Externally, he will engage at all levels in research, development, consulting, opportunity analysis, and community outreach. A skilled software engineer and scientific data architect with over twenty-five years of experience across a wide variety of disciplines, Dana started his career at The HDF Group working on a bioinformatics project, then moved to library development. He’s worked on projects including...

Oct
17
2022

When using HDF5 or HSDS you’ve likely benefited (even if you weren’t aware of it) caching features built into the software that can drastically improve performance. HSDS and h5pyd utilize caching to improve performance for service-based applications. In this post, we’ll do a quick review of how HDF5 library caching works and then dive into HSDS and h5pyd caching (with a brief discussion of web caching)....