Blog

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...

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)....

We are excited to announce the appointment of Neil Fortner as the new Chief HDF5 Software Architect. Neil has worked for The HDF Group as a software engineer since 2008. While at The HDF Group, he focused his talents in storage and HPC on improving performance, expanding the features, and improving the maintainability of the HDF5 library. Neil has a proven history of quickly diving into and improving large, complex code bases. As the Chief HDF5 Software Architect, Neil will develop detailed architectural designs for software solutions internally and for our consulting clients. He will be a mentor within the engineering team as we continue to grow. Neil received his bachelor's in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland. In his spare...

The HDF Group hosted, Loïc Huder of ESRF for a webinar on Vscode-h5web: A VSCode extension to explore and visualize HDF5 files on August 31, 2022. H5Web is a web viewer for HDF5 files. It can be used to browse HDF5 files and display datasets with performant WebGL-based visualisations. While such files can be requested from a separate server (e.g. HSDS) for modularity, it is now possible to load and explore a file fully in the browser by using a WebAssembly HDF5 library called h5wasm. In this talk, presenter Loïc Huder will show how the team leveraged h5wasm to design a VSCode extension that uses H5Web to explore and visualize HDF5 files. Once the H5Web extension is installed, exploring and visualising...