HDF Newsletter 19

Feb. 9, 1996

Contents

• HDF4.0r1 release
• HDF4.0 documentation
• Progress in HDF related projects
• Platforms to be dropped

• New HDFers

We are very glad to announce that HDF4.0r1 is now officially released. HDF4.0 represents a substantial revision, expansion and improvement of the HDF library over HDF3.3. Its new features include:

• Interfaces that support multi-file/multi-object access for raster images and annotations, similar to the multifile SDS interface.
• Support for n-bit integer data within the SDS interface.
• Support for RLE, adaptive Huffman and Gzip deflation compression for SDSs.
• Uses v5 of Independent JPEG Group (IJG) JPEG file access library
• Support low level function for RLE, adaptive Huffman and Gzip deflation compression for any object.
• Support for creation and search for external elements.
• Support for external vdata elements.
• Unified auto-configuration that eases the installation and test of HDF package on UNIX platforms.
• A new version of dimension record decreasing the size of HDF files which contain large 1-dimensional SDS's.
• A new HDF utility hdp -- an HDF file dumper
• Full support for SGI Power Challenge running IRIX6.1
• Support for parallel I/O on the Thinking Machines' CM-5.
• Modifications in the implementation of memory management that decrease the required memory size and execution time.
• Integration of Pablo performance measurement software.
• I/O performance improvements
• Limited support for reading CDF files.

Details are listed in the $(toplevel)/release_notes/aBOUT_4.0r1 file.

HDF4.0r1 has been tested on: SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, IRIX5.3, IRIX6.1 (both 32-bit and 64-bit modes), HPUX 9.03, UNICOS 803, CM5, AIX v3.2, Digital Unix v3.2, Dec Alpha OpenVMS AXP v6.2, Solarisx86, Linux(a.out) v1.2.4, and Free BSD 2.0. More details are included in the $(toplevel)/INSTALL file.

Many thanks to the HDF4.0 alpha and beta testers for their feedback, comments and suggestions.

An HDF 4.0 User's Guide is available on the NCSA ftp server, ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, in the subdirectory:

/HDF/Documentation/HDF4.0/Users_Guide/.

We are working on more documentation, including a new Getting Started manual, a new HDF 4.0 Reference Manual, and a new HDF Specification and Developer's Guide. We will announce the availability of these documents as they are completed.

BigHDF

In the last Newsletter we described the BigHDF project, in which we are building a prototype next-generation HDF. A proposed specification for the prototype is available on the web at:

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/internal/NRA/BigHDFSpec.html

There is also a reproduction of the talk on BigHDF entitled "HDF: The Next Generation," given by Mike Folk and Quincey Koziol, at:

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nra/BigHDF/talk/coverpage.html

We welcome your comments and ideas about BigHDF.

HDF Support for Parallel Computing Environment

With support from NASA's Advanced Information Systems Research project (AISR), we are designing new features to provide HDF library support for the parallel computing environment of Network of Workstations (HDF-NOW).

The preliminary design has been completed and we are in the stage of functional definitions. We plan to release a prototype version this year.

Tentative platforms are the IBM SP2 and network of workstations like HP, SGI and Sun. More details are available at:

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/parallel_hdf.html

Due to lack of resources and waning interest, we have decided to stop supporting HDF on the following platforms:

DecStation/MIPSEL
NeXT/Next-STEP
Fujitsu VP/UXPM
Intel i860
IRIX4.0
IRIX5.2
VAX/VMS

If you need HDF support on these platforms, please contact us and we will try to help you port HDF 4.0 to them.

Don Gibson, a University of Illinois M.B.A. student, has been working with the HDF group for several months. Don is helping to manage the concurrent HDF projects and assisting in the development of future projects. He is currently helping to write an HDF business plan.

Barbara Jones recently joined us to help provide user-support to the HDF community. She comes to us with 16 years of programming and technical support experience. Barbara moved here from Providence, Rhode Island where she spent the last 6 years as a Technical Support Specialist at Cadre Tech.