HDF Newsletter 53

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CONTENTS

The HDF5-1.2.1 release has been placed under:
        ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/prev-releases/

The HDF5 documentation can be found on the NCSA FTP Server in the directory:
        ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/docs/

For more information look at the HDF5 home page at:
        http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/

Features Added since HDF5-1.2.1

• Added internal free-lists to reduce memory required by the library and H5garbage_collect API function.
• h5dump displays opaque and bitfield types.
• New features added to snapshots. Use 'snapshot help' to see a complete list of features.
• Improved configure to detect if MPIO routines are available when parallel mode is requested.

• h5dump correctly displays compound datatypes, including simple and nested compound types.
• h5dump correctly displays the committed copy of predefined types.
• Corrected an error in h5toh4 which did not convert the 32-bit int from HDF5 to HDF4 correctly for the T3E platform.
• Corrected a floating point number conversion error for the Cray J90 platform. The error did not convert the value 0.0 correctly.
• Fixed error in H5Giterate which was not updating the "index" parameter correctly.
• Fixed error in hyperslab iteration which was not walking through the correct sequence of array elements if hyperslabs were staggered in a certain pattern.
• Fixed several other problems in hyperslab iteration code.
• Fixed another H5Giterate bug which caused groups with large numbers of objects in them to misbehave when the callback function returned non-zero values.
• Changed return type of H5Aiterate and H5A_operator_t typedef to be herr_t, to align them with the dataset and group iterator functions.
• Changed H5Screate_simple and H5Sset_extent_simple to not allow dimensions of size 0 without the same dimension being unlimited.
• Improved metadata hashing & caching algorithms to avoid many hash flushes and also removed some redundant I/O when moving metadata blocks in the file.
• The libhdf5.settings file shows the correct machine byte-sex.
• The "struct(opt)" type conversion function which gets invoked for certain compound datatype conversions was fixed for nested compound types. This required a small change in the datatype conversion function API.

• SunOS 5.6 with C WorkShop Compilers 4.2: hyperslab selections will fail if library is compiled using optimization of any level.
• TFLOPS: dsets test fails if compiled with optimization turned on.
• J90: tools fail to display data for the datasets with a compound datatype.

  AIX 4.3.3 (IBM SP)            3.6.6                               | binaries
                                mpicc using mpich 1.1.2             | are not
                                mpicc_r using IBM MPI-IO prototype  | available
  AIX 4.3.2.0 (IBM SP)          xlc 5.0.1.0
  Cray J90 10.0.0.7             cc 6.3.0.2
  Cray T3E 2.0.5.29             cc 6.3.0.2
                                mpt.1.3
  FreeBSD 4.0                   gcc 2.95.2
  HP-UX B.10.20                 HP C  HP92453-01 A.10.32
  HP-UX B.11.00                 HP92453-01 A.11.00.13 HP C Compiler 
                                (static library only, h5toh4 tool is not available) 
  IRIX 6.5                      MIPSpro cc 7.30
  IRIX64 6.5 (64 & n32)         MIPSpro cc 7.3.1m
                                mpt.1.4

  Linux 2.2.10 SMP              gcc 2.95.1 
                                mpicc(gcc-2.95.1)
                                gcc (egcs-2.91.66)
                                mpicc (egcs-2.91.66)
  Linux 2.2.16 (RedHat 6.2)     gcc 2.95.2

  OSF1 V4.0                     DEC-V5.2-040
  SunOS 5.6                     cc WorkShop Compilers 5.0 no optimization
  SunOS 5.7                     cc WorkShop Compilers 5.0
  SolarisX86 SunOS 5.5.1        gcc version 2.7.2 with --disable-hsizet
  TFLOPS 3.2.1                  pgcc Rel 3.1-3i
                                mpich-1.1.2 with local changes
  Windows NT4.0 sp5             MSVC++ 6.0
  Windows 98                    MSVC++ 6.0
  Windows 2000                  MSVC++ 6.0

Tools are under development to read and write XML and HDF5, and the DTD is still under development. We encourage developers and users to use the DTD and send us feedback and discussion.

Feedback may be sent to:
        hdf5dev@ncsa.uiuc.edu

The DTD itself is available at the following URL:
        http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/DTDs/HDF5-File.dtd