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MuQun (Kent) Yang, The HDF Group

Many NASA HDF and HDF5 data products can be visualized via the Hyrax OPeNDAP server through Hyrax’s HDF4 and HDF5 handlers.  Now we’ve enhanced the HDF5 OPeNDAP handler so that SMAP level 1, level 3 and level 4 products can be displayed properly using popular visualization tools.

Organizations in both the public and private sectors use HDF to meet long term, mission-critical data management needs. For example, NASA’s Earth Observing System, the primary data repository for understanding global climate change, uses HDF.  Over the lifetime of the project, which began in 1999, NASA has stored 15 petabytes of satellite data in HDF which will be accessible by NASA data centers and NASA HDF end users for many years to come.

In a previous blog, we discussed the concept of using the Hyrax OPeNDAP web server to serve NASA HDF4 and HDF5 products.  Each year, The HDF Group has enhanced the HDF4 and HDF5 handlers that work within the Hyrax OPeNDAP framework to support all sorts of NASA HDF data products, making them interoperable with popular Earth Science tools such as NASA’s Panoply and UCAR’s IDV.  The Hyrax HDF4 and HDF5 handlers make data products display properly using popular visualization tools. 

April 1, 2016

Lindsay Powers, The HDF Group

The HDF Group is collaborating with the University of California, Santa Barbara and Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE), to help scientific research communities enhance the consistency and quality of their metadata, to foster discovery, access and understanding of data resources. As part of this collaboration, on February 9, 2016, The HDF Group’s Ted Habermann, Director of Earth Science, and Lindsay Powers, Deputy Director of Earth Science will co-lead a webinar “Sharing Data Through Guided Metadata Improvement” along with Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics Research at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. 

February 1, 2016

Ted Habermann, The HDF Group

The first week of January brought leaders of the Earth Science informatics community together in Washington DC for the winter meeting of the Federation of  Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP Federation). This year NOAA’s Environmental Data Management Workshop was co-located with ESIP for five exciting days of data management ideas and discussions. The HDF Group was well represented at both of these meetings with presentations on metadata and data containers.

The ESIP Federation comes together twice each year to discuss topics around changing technology, data, information and knowledge in support of society. ESIP meetings are interdisciplinary and inclusive. Among the attendees are Earth science data and information technology practitioners; researchers representing a variety of scientific domains that include land, atmosphere, ocean, solid earth, ecology, data and social sciences; science educators; and anyone working in science and technology-related fields who is interested in advancing Earth science information best practices in an open and transparent fashion. 

January 20, 2016

Lindsay Powers, The HDF Group

The 2015 HDF workshop held during the ESIP Summer Meeting was a great success thanks to more than 40 participants throughout the four sessions.  The workshop was an excellent opportunity for us to interact with HDF community members to better understand their needs and introduce them to new technologies. You can view the slide presentations from the workshop here.

From my perspective, the highlight of the workshop was the Vendors and Tools Session where we heard from Ellen Johnson (Mathworks), Christine White (Esri), Brian Tisdale (NASA), and Gerd Heber (The HDF Group) talk about new, and improved applications of HDF technologies.  For example:  

September 16, 2015

Quincey Koziol, The HDF Group

“A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.” – Ken Batcher, Prof. Emeritus, Kent State University.

HDF5 began out of a collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC), so high-performance computing (HPC) I/O has been in our focus from the very beginning.  As we are starting our 20th year of development on HDF5, HPC I/O continues to be a critical driver of new features.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, each capable of performing more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. Here, ASC is examining the effects of a one-megaton nuclear energy source detonated on the surface of an asteroid. Image from ASC at http://www.lanl.gov/asci/

The HDF5 development team has focused on three things when serving the HPC community: performance, freedom of choice and ease of use.

August 27, 2015

David Dotson, doctoral student, Center for Biological Physics, Arizona State University; HDF Guest Blogger

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony Scopatz for the first time at SciPy 2015, and we talked shop. I was interested in his opinions on MDSynthesis, a Python package our lab has designed to help manage the complexity of raw and derived data sets from molecular dynamics simulations, about which I was

Mohamad Chaarawi, The HDF Group

Second in a series: Parallel HDF5

NERSC’s Cray Sonexion system provides data storage for its Mendel scientific computing cluster.

In my previous blog post, I discussed the need for parallel I/O and a few paradigms for doing parallel I/O from applications. HDF5 is an I/O middleware library that supports (or will support in the near future) most of the I/O paradigms we talked about.

In this blog post I will discuss how to use HDF5 to implement some of the parallel I/O methods and some of the ongoing research to support new I/O paradigms. I will not discuss pros and cons of each method since we discussed those in the previous blog post.

But before getting on with how HDF5 supports parallel I/O, let’s address a question that comes up often, which is,

“Why do I need Parallel HDF5 when the MPI standard already provides an interface for doing I/O?”

August 21, 2015

John Readey, The HDF Group

Editor’s Note: Since this post was written in 2015, The HDF Group has developed HDF Cloud, a new product that addresses the challenges of adapting large scale array-based computing to the cloud and object storage while intelligently handling the full data management life cycle. If this is something that interests you, we’d love to hear from you.

 

Interestingly enough, in addition to being known as the place to go for BBQ and live music, Austin, Texas is a major hub of Python development.  Each year, Austin is host to the annual confab of Python developers known as the SciPy Conference.  Enthought, a local Python-based company, was the major sponsor of the conference and did a great job of organizing the event.  By the way, Enthought is active in Python-based training, and I thought the tutorial sessions I attended were very well done.  If you would like to get some expert training on various aspects of Python, check out their offerings.

As a first-time conference attendee, I found attending the talks and tutorials very informative and entertaining.  The conference’s focus is the set of packages that form the core of the SciPy ecosystem (SciPy, iPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and SymPy) and the ever-increasing number of specialized packages around this core.     

July 30, 2015

Ted Habermann, The HDF Group

I first heard of HDF during the “Data Format Wars” of the 1990’s. These “battles” centered on the selection of a format for the emerging NASA Earth Observing System archives, and there were a number of contenders. HDF won that battle in the end because of the inherent flexibility of the format and the tools for reading and writing it.

Now, twenty years later, HDF has emerged as the foundation format for an incredibly diverse and growing selection of scientific and commercial disciplines.

Is it the inherent flexibility of the format that has led to this success? Maybe, but I would pick information integration as the killer HDF feature. 

July 24, 2015

Lindsay Powers - The HDF Group The HDF Group provides free, open-source software that is widely used in government, academia and industry. The goal of The HDF Group is to ensure the sustainable development of HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) technologies and the ongoing accessibility of HDF-stored data because users and organizations have mission-critical systems and archives relying on these technologies. These users and organizations are a critical element of the HDF community and an important source of new and innovative uses of, and sustainability for, the HDF platforms, libraries and tools. We want to create a sustainability model for the open access platforms and libraries that can serve these diverse communities in the future use and preservation of their data. As a...

June 8, 2015
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