The HDF Group Receives U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Safe‑OSE Award to Strengthen HDF5 Security for Science, Industry, and National Security

For Immediate Release. Champaign, ILL — Dec. 10, 2025. The HDF Group today announced that it has been selected by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding under the inaugural Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open‑Source Ecosystems (Safe‑OSE) investment. The new project, titled “NSF‑Safe‑OSE: Strengthening HDF5 for Science, Industry, and National Security Applications” (Award […]

​Release of HDF5 2.0.0 (Newsletter #207)

Executive Summary: HDF5 2.0.0 now adheres to semantic versioning conventions while maintaining the trusted format and library you rely on. This version has been modernized for today’s workflows, making it easier to convert raw data into results. It simplifies setup and usage, increases confidence through safer defaults and improved release practices, and reduces unwanted side

How to Build HDF5 library and h5py in a Conda Virtual Environment (Update)

This post is an update of one originally published in September 2024. We’ve updated it with some of the features available in the next HDF5 library release 2.0: Introduction to CMake presets and how they can be used when building the library, new ROS3 backend, and building the library with a faster DEFLATE compression filter.

​Release of HDF 4.3.1 (Newsletter #206)

The HDF 4.3.1 release is now available from the HDF 4.3.1 download page on The HDF Group’s support site. For information on HDF4, see the HDF4 page. This is a minor release that adds support for new platforms and compilers, several bug fixes, including uninitialized memory and memory leak issues. Please see the full release

Appointment of New Director of Engineering

I am pleased to announce an important change in our leadership at The HDF Group. M. Scot Breitenfeld has been appointed our new Director of Engineering. Since joining our organization in 2008, Scot has contributed significantly to our mission and has developed an extensive understanding of our technology and community over the past 17 years.

Release of HDF5 1.14.6 (Newsletter #205)

The HDF5 1.14.6 release is now available from the HDF5 1.14.6 download page. This is a maintenance release with some minor new changes: Reverted a change to the library’s handling of UTF-8 file names. A change was made in the HDF5 1.14.4 release to address some issues with the library’s handling of code pages and

A Turing Test for HDF5

by John Readey “For Heaven’s sake, do not confound HDF5 with anything else!” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Alan Turing devised the Turing test (he referred to it as the “Imitation Game”) in 1950 to determine whether a machine could think. He believed that if machines could give answers that were indistinguishable from human answers, then

How to Build the HDF5 library and h5py in a Conda Virtual Environment

Virtual environments are very popular method for ordinary computer users to install software into an isolated space without assistance from their system administrators. The conda package manager is one of the most widely used tools for managing virtual environments. We are going to install software only from the conda-forge package repository, which is a community GitHub organization that maintains a large number of software packages.

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