-------------------------------------------------------------------------- The HDF Group Home Page: http://hdfgroup.org/ Helpdesk & Mailing Lists Info: http://hdfgroup.org/services/support.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter #114 June 15, 2010 CONTENTS - Release of HDF5 1.8.5 - HDF and HDF-EOS Workshop XIV - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Release of HDF5 1.8.5 ===================== The HDF5 1.8.5 release is now available. Many thanks to the users on the HDF Forum who helped us with this release! HDF5 1.8.5 can be downloaded from: http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/release/obtain5.html This page can be accessed from The HDF Group Downloads page: http://www.hdfgroup.org/downloads/ The HDF5 1.8.5 documentation is located in: http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/ For information on HDF5, see the HDF5 home page: http://www.hdfgroup.org/products/hdf5/index.html HDF5 1.8.5 is a minor release, but includes some important new features and several bug fixes. New features and changes in this release include the following: - This release adds support for building HDF5 using CMake 2.8.1 (See http://www.cmake.org/). This is the first step in supporting CMake with HDF5. Only a subset of the configuration features is available with CMake. The subset includes the C, Fortran, C++ and High-Level shared and static libraries, and the gzip and szip compression methods. Initial work targets building on Windows only, but CMake can be used on other platforms, as well. Please refer to the CMake.txt file in the release_docs/ directory of the source code for more details on building HDF5 with CMake. We would like to thank John Biddiscombe and Michael Jackson for introducing us to CMake, for contributing the code, fixing bugs and testing on different platforms. We would also like to thank Sean McBride for testing HDF5 CMake and Solomon Gibbs for sharing his private SZIP library distribution that builds with CMake. - Various "strict aliasing" problems were fixed in HDF5, allowing higher levels of compiler optimization (in particular, allowing '-O3' to work with recent versions of GCC). - We substantially improved parallel and sequential performance when extending a dataset with early allocation. This improvement reduces the overhead (i.e. the time spent doing everything but writing to disk) by up to 2 orders of magnitude. - Packaging has changed for the pre-built binaries that are provided on the obtain5.html page. The SZIP and ZLIB external libraries are now included within the pre-built binaries to simplify using them. We also provide RPMS for 32 and 64-bit Linux platforms. For information on installing the RPMS, please see the README: http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/current/bin/RPMS/README - Several fixes and changes have been made to the tools (h5diff, h5ls, h5copy, h5repack and h5dump). Among them are improvements to the handling of symbolic links and datasets with object and region references, and a new feature to display bits packed into an integer. - Several C++ changes are included. - AIX 6.1 was added to the list of the tested platforms (sequential only). For more information, please refer to the RELEASE.txt file that is included in the source code. It can be accessed from The HDF Group web site here: http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/current/src/unpacked/release_docs/RELEASE.txt HDF and HDF-EOS Workshop XIV ============================ The fourteenth HDF and HDF-EOS Workshop has been announced. It will be held in the home city of The HDF Group, in Champaign, Illinois, from September 28th - 30th, 2010. For more information regarding the workshop, please visit the workshop web site: http://www.hdfeos.org/workshops/ws14/workshop_fourteen.php ------------------------------------------------------------ For questions regarding these or other HDF issues, contact: help@hdfgroup.org