Release of HDF 4.3.0 (Newsletter #201)
The HDF 4.3.0 release is now available from the HDF 4.3.0 download page on the HDF Support Portal....
The HDF 4.3.0 release is now available from the HDF 4.3.0 download page on the HDF Support Portal....
The HDF 4.2.16 release is now available from the HDF 4.2.16 download page on the HDF Support Portal. While this is a minor release comprised of many smaller clean-up tasks, there are several noteworthy changes....
The HDF 4.2.15 release is now available from the HDF 4.2.15 download page on the HDF Support Portal. For information on HDF, see the HDF4 page....
HDFql offers a language similar to SQL for HDF5. By providing a simpler/cleaner interface, HDFql aims to ease scientific computing and big data management....
Champaign, IL — The HDF Group today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed David Pearah as its new Chief Executive Officer. The HDF Group is a software company dedicated to creating high performance computing technology to address many of today’s Big Data challenges.
Pearah replaces Mike Folk upon his retirement after ten years as company President and Board Chair. Folk will remain a member of the Board of Directors, and Pearah will become the company’s Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Pearah said, “I am honored to have been selected as The HDF Group’s next CEO. It is a privilege to be part of an organization with a nearly 30-year history of delivering innovative technology to meet the Big Data demands of commercial industry, scientific research and governmental clients.”
Industry leaders in fields from aerospace and biomedicine to finance join the company’s client list. In addition, government entities such as the Department of Energy and NASA, numerous research facilities, and scientists in disciplines from climate study to astrophysics depend on HDF technologies.
Pearah continued, “We are an organization led by a mission to make a positive impact on everyone we engage, whether they are individuals using our open-source software, or organizations who rely on our talented team of scientists and engineers as trusted partners. I will do my best to serve the HDF community by enabling our team to fulfill their passion to make a difference. We’ve just delivered a major release of HDF5 with many additional powerful features, and we’re very excited about several innovative new products that we’ll soon be making available to our user community.”
“Dave is clearly the leader for HDF’s future, and
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.
HDF Group is hosting a one-day workshop at the upcoming Federation for Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting in Asilomar, CA on July 14th. Please join us to learn about new HDF tools, projects and perspectives. There will also be an HDF Town Hall meeting on Wednesday afternoon July 15th...
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...
Large, rich and complex collections of HDF data can be filtered and viewed with the help of OPeNDAP. HDF data can be provided in manageable servings, on demand in real time, inexpensively, even on the user's desktop or mobile device....
The HDF Earth Science Program is well aware of this important legacy. We focus on continuing support of U.S. environmental satellite programs (NASA Earth Observing System and Joint Polar Satellite System, JPSS), on-going quality assurance of the HDF libraries and helping data users access and understand products written in HDF. The HDF-EOS Information Center (#hdfeos) includes code examples in MATLAB, IDL, NCL, and Python, many driven by user questions. The site also provides information on other HDF tools.
NASA’s decision ensured a role for HDF in Earth Science and set an important precedent. HDF developers, along with the U.S. and other Earth Observing nations, developed a clear distinction between Earth Science Data Objects (grids, swaths, profiles…); the metadata required to describe them; and the HDF objects (datasets, groups, attributes, etc.) that make them up.
The critical realization was that communities like EOS needed conventions for describing Earth Science objects to enable using and sharing those objects. These conventions, termed HDF-EOS, have been used successfully in hundreds of NASA products that can be easily shared among multiple users using standard tools.
Many other Earth Science communities have used the powerful combination of conventions and HDF.