HDF Newsletter 34
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July 15, 1998
CONTENTS
Release of hdf5-1.0.0.a2
Release hdf5-1.0.0.a2, the second alpha release of the HDF5 library, is now
available. The release distribution is located at:
ftp://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/pub/dist/HDF5/
The main web-site for the HDF5 project is located at:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5
New Features and Changes
- Compressed datasets are now supported. HDF5 supports user-defined
compression, as well as the freely available 'deflate' method
of compression.
- Improved Group API. There are now query functions to determine
the contents of an HDF file with no prior knowledge. In addition,
groups can now share objects.
- Attributes on datasets are now supported.
- Revised and improved dataspace API.
- Better support for data types and data type conversions,
especially floating-point types. The numbered types have been
removed from the API. Data types can be stored in the file as
independent objects and multiple datasets can share a data type.
- Support for datasets and files over 2GB in size.
- Support for external dataset storage in other files.
- Several changes have been made to Parallel HDF5, including
support for parallel I/O of chunked datasets.
- The error handling API, 'H5E', has been completed. By default,
when an API function returns a failure an error stack is displayed
on the standard error stream.
- Improved performance.
- Two of the packages have been renamed. The dataspace API
has been renamed from 'H5P' to 'H5S' and the property list
(template) API has been renamed from 'H5C' to 'H5P'.
- More debugging support has been added.
Please refer to the HDF5 User's Guide for more information on the
new features in HDF5.
We welcome any feedback on the current state of the library and where
you would like to see it go.
Platforms Tested
This release of HDF5 has been tested on the following UNIX platforms:
Linux, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris, Digital Unix
Parallel HDF5 has been tested on the IBM SP2 and SGI Origin 2000.