HDF Newsletter 76

February 24, 2004


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Release of HDF5-1.6.2

New Features and Changes
Platforms Tested
Known Problems

Release of HDF5-1.6.2

HDF5-1.6.2 is now available for download from the NCSA HDF5 home page at:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/

The HDF5 documentation is included in the source code and can also be accessed from:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/

This is a fully tested release. The configuration features supported in this release can be viewed at:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/SuppConfigFeats.html

The RELEASE.txt file in the source code contains detailed information about this release:

    ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/src/unpacked/release_docs/RELEASE.txt

For information on functions that have changed in HDF5-1.6.2, see:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/ADGuide/Changes.html

New Features and Changes

The major new features and changes in HDF5-1.6.2 are:

HDF5 Fortran APIs are supported for MAC OS X with the IBM XL Fortran compiler version 8.1 Beta.
New Functions have been added to HDF5 for C and F90: H5Iget_ref, H5Iinc_ref and H5Idec_ref.
The HDF5 C and C++ libraries have been ported to Linux64 Red Hat 8.
The HDF5 C, C++ and Fortran sequential libraries, and C and Fortran parallel libraries are available for Altix (Linux ia64).
For Parallel HDF5, the "h5pcc" and "h5pfc" have been added for compiling applications.
This release contains numerous bug fixes, including:
- Fixed several errors in B-tree deletion code which could cause a B-tree (used with groups and chunked datasets) to become corrupt with the right sequence of deleted objects.
- Fixed several problems with variable length datatypes.
- Fixed a couple of problems with hyperslab selections.
- Fixed bug where scalar dataspaces for attributes were reporting as simple dataspaces.
- Fixed various floating-point conversion problems, including a change which could corrupt data when converting from double->float.

Please refer to the RELEASE.txt file in the source code for a comprehensive list of new features and changes.

Platforms Tested

  AIX 5.1 (32, 64 bit)
  Cray T3E, SV1, T90IEEE
  FreeBSD 
  HP-UX 
  IA-32 
  IA-64
  IRIX64 (32 and 64 bit)
  Linux 2.4 
  Mac OS X
  OSF1 
  Solaris  (32 and 64 bit)
  TFLOPS
  Windows

For further information please refer to the following page (or the RELEASE.txt file):

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/platforms5.html

Known Problems

Known problems at release time are listed in the RELEASE.txt file that comes with the source code.

Further information on known problems can be found on the following page:

  http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/known_problems5.html

HDF Newsletter 76

CONTENTS

Release of HDF5-1.6.2

New Features and Changes

Platforms Tested

Known Problems