Date of publication in the Champaign, Ill., News-Gazette: December 5, 2010
By DON DODSON Copyright 2010 The News-Gazette
Here are some ways companies and researchers use HDF technology:
- An aerospace company uses HDF for managing flight test data, for military flight test applications and for simulations.
"When you run a flight test, you can have 4,000 or 5,000 instruments in an airplane spitting out data every few milliseconds," said Mike Folk, CEO of The HDF Group.
"It's a massive amount of data - temperature, airspeed, pressure, audio, what the pilot is saying .. video The beauty of HDF is it can package all that data in one container."
- There are also growing applications for HDF in the field of genomics, or bioinformatics.
"When they first started to sequence DNA, they might get a few hundred data elements in a day," Folk said.
"In the last two to three years, instruments for sequencing DNA became so powerful, they're generating millions of times more data in a given time (period) than they could five or six years ago," he said. "Old technologies for working with that data just don't work."
- The HDF Group recently worked with a computer chip manufacturer. Chips are made on wafers, and a wafer could have 1,000 chips that need to be tested. Tests could yield a table of results with 10,000 columns, and the manufacturer wanted to find the best way to store that information.
"HDF5 (The HDF Group's newest file format for storing scientific data) was really the only way they could find to even store it," Folk said.
- Sony Pictures Imageworks, which creates digital animation and visual effects, has used HDF for data used in computer graphics, Folk said.
The company developed an internal system based on HDF5 and has since shared its system with other animators, he said.
- A major financial institution that has to make split-second decisions about investments began calling on HDF's resources in December 2004.
HDF was considering becoming independent from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at that point. It told the client that if the company was willing to guarantee a certain amount of business the first year, it could become HDF's first customer.
HDF ended up signing a non-disclose, non-compete contract with the financial firm and was guaranteed $400,000 a year in business for the first two years, Folk said.
Today that financial firm furnishes about 30 percent of The HDF Group's annual revenues. Another 30 percent comes from NASA's Earth Observing System, which has used HDF for many years.