Subject: Re: Whats going to happen to HDF ?

From: [email-masked] (Mike Folk)
Date: Mon, 23 May 1994 10:15:28 +0300

In article <[email-masked]>, 
[email-masked] (Ata Etemadi) wrote:

> As you may know Chris Houck from NCSA has left to join Mosaic
> Communications Corp. Does anyone know whow this will effect the
> development of HDF 4.0 ?
> 
> 	best regards
> 		Ata <(|)>.
> -- 

Good question, Ata.  Our original plans were to have a full beta 
version of HDF 4.0 ready by mid-summer.  Chris's departure last 
week will surely affect the speed with which we complete HDF 4.0, 
and it may even affect the feature list.  (See below for 
specifics.) 

In the five weeks before he departed, Chris did an outstanding job 
of transferring his special knowledge and insights about HDF to 
the rest of the HDF staff.  This will help a great deal as we work 
toward completing the HDF 4.0 implementation. Chris's position 
will most likely be taken over by George Velamparampil, an HDF 
graduate student developer over the past two years.  Our net loss
due to Chris' departure will therefore be 1/2 person.  

(This of course does not tell the whole story.  Chris has been a 
tremendous asset to the HDF project during the 2.5 years that he 
was with us.  He added the netCDF interface to HDF, made SDS 
compatible with the netCDF and CDF data models, and made countless 
improvements and fixes to the HDF code.  Chris contributed 
valuable advice on HDF-related problems and issues.  In addition 
to all this, Chris provided continuous support to the growing 
population of HDF users.)

But what about HDF 4.0?  The defining characteristic of HDF 4.0 is 
that it support multi-file and multi-object access to all major 
HDF objects, just as it now supports such access for SDS objects.  
The full list of features we have planned for HDF 4.0 includes the 
following:

  1. Interfaces that support multi-file/multi-object access
     for raster images and annotations, similar to the current
     SDS interface.
  2. Support for n-bit integer data within the SDS interface.
  3. Support for parallel I/O on the Thinking Machines' CM-5.
  4. Limited support for reading CDF files.
  5. Support for compression for SDSs.
  6. Support for chunked storage of SDSs.
  7. Source code support for FORTRAN and ANSI C only.

This week we hope to release an alpha version of HDF 4.0 that 
includes items #2, 3, 4 and 7.  We are considering postponing one 
or more of the other features (probably the chunked storage, maybe 
the multi-file support for annotations) in order to speed up the 
release, but have not decided yet for sure.  We welcome your 
thoughts about these features.

Mike Folk
HDF Project Lead

---

From: [email-masked] (Ata Etemadi)
Date: Tue, 24 May 94 15:55:39 BST

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Mike Folk) writes:

Chris visited us here at Imperial and was a great deal of help.
Discussions with him certainly improved our knowledge and understanding
of HDF and hopefully helped him to understand some of the problems
we face as scientists. It would be great to have some kind of yearly
forum for HDF developers in Europe and US. I know the CDF folks 
set up such meetings on a yearly basis. I am certainly willing to
host the European version for HDF. 

|> But what about HDF 4.0?  The defining characteristic of HDF 4.0 is 
|> that it support multi-file and multi-object access to all major 
|> HDF objects, just as it now supports such access for SDS objects.  
|> The full list of features we have planned for HDF 4.0 includes the 
|> following:
|> 
|>   1. Interfaces that support multi-file/multi-object access
|>      for raster images and annotations, similar to the current
|>      SDS interface.
|>   2. Support for n-bit integer data within the SDS interface.
|>   3. Support for parallel I/O on the Thinking Machines' CM-5.
|>   4. Limited support for reading CDF files.
|>   5. Support for compression for SDSs.
|>   6. Support for chunked storage of SDSs.
|>   7. Source code support for FORTRAN and ANSI C only.
 
4. will certainly be very very very welcome since the International
Solar Terrestial Physics (ISTP) committee, responsible for hundreds
of space missions, have decided on CDF as their primary format. We
use HDF-netCDF so I have had to write an HDF-netCDF to CDF converter. 
Your CDF interface couldn't have come at a better time. Hopefully 
we will see you add a C++ interface in future. Thanks very much for
your detailed response.

	best regards
		Ata <(|)>.
-- 
         Dr Ata Etemadi, Blackett Laboratory,
         Space and Atmospheric Physics Group,
         Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine,
         Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BZ, ENGLAND
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