Errors and feature requests will be prioritized in consultation with HDF, ECS, and users, and addressed in a timely manner. The addition of features requires changes in interfaces, and this means keeping the C, HDF, Java and HDF APIs up to date. It requires keeping documentation, test suites and configurations current. In particular, in 2004, HDF will improve support for HDF 90 compilers for HDF4 and HDF5.
The list of known bugs in HDF4 was prioritized according to their effect on EOSDIS users. All high priority bugs will be fixed for HDF4 r2.1 which is planned for the end of the fourth quarter of 2004.
Similarly, all major HDF5 bugs and features were prioritized and fixed in the 1.6.2 and 1.6.3 releases (February and October, 2004, respectively), with priority given to those that most affect the HDF-HDF community.
Extensive effort went into providing better support for the HDF compression method in both the HDF4 and HDF5 libraries. This included fixing bugs in the HDF library, reworking the configuration of the HDF library to use GNU autoconf tools, and revising the HDF5 APIs to ease HDF compression usage. , The HDF compression usage had to be changed, and HDF5 binaries had to be provided with and without HDF encoding to address license issues among user of HDF5. HDF4 users will get similar features with the HDF4.2r1 release.
This effort involved extensive planning and collaboration with the University of Idaho team that owns the license for the HDF code and who maintains the HDF library source code.
Except for HDF, no major enhancements were done to the HDF4 library.
A number of new features were added to HDF5 for the 1.6.2 and 1.6.3 releases. Those features include completed HDF APIs, the new h5repack tool, helper scripts for parallel compilation, and several new APIs . Support for the following compilers was added to HDF5:
PGI Fortran for Linux64-bit
Absoft F95 for Linux2.4 32-bit
IBM and Absoft F95 for Mac OS X
Support for the compilers in HDF4 is planned for the HDF4.2r1 release.
3.2.2Maintain platform support
Software will be maintained on, or ported to, all systems of importance to EOS. This also involves upgrading configurations and testing regimes. It is anticipated that the next six years will see increasing use of high performance systems such as Linux clusters.
In 2003, NCSA substantially improved the configuration for the HDF4 library, but there remains legacy code that can be streamlined to reduce the cost of future maintenance. To address this, we will clean up legacy code in 2004.
HDF5 was ported to the AMD and SGI Altrix platforms. The complete list of the supported platforms and compilers is available at: http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/platforms5.html for HDF5 and http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/release4/platforms.html for HDF4.
To keep the cost of maintaining little-used architectures and operating systems down, we dropped the support for Windows NT and IRIX-6.5 during late 2003 – 2004.
Considerable work was done to improve configuration of the HDF5 library to support encoding/decoding capabilities in the Szip library, and multiple C and Fortran compilers on Linux platforms (Intel, PGI, Gnu C).
Extensive effort went into improving building, testing and installing the Windows distribution. Starting with the 1.6.3 release the HDF5 Windows library and tests can be built outside the MSVC++ environment, making regression testing on Windows platforms more efficient (it can be automated). A lot of improvements were done to the Windows documentation. Windows Web pages were created (http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/windows.html) to address the maintenance and support issues for all HDF products on Windows platforms.
Some legacy code issues in HDF4 will be addressed in the HDF4.2r1 release.
3.2.3Documentation
The HDF group will prepare documentation in a timely manner, including User’s Guides for libraries and utilities, and an up-to-date reference manual at the time of each new release of the NCSA HDF library.
In addition, in 2004 NCSA will also complete the HDF5 User’s Guide.
HDF documentation is available with every major release of the HDF software in the HTML and PDF formats. Work on the HDF5 User’s Guide is still in progress. Currently seven revised chapters are available on the Web: http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/UG/.
The C++ Reference Manual and HDF5 C++ API Design Specifications were added to the HDF5 Documentation set. The HDF5 File Format Specification went through several rounds of revisions and updates to keep the document current with the HDF5 library development. Documentation pages were restructured to incorporate new materials and to improve access to the old ones.
3.2.4Conduct periodic releases
Produce at least one new release for HDF4 to keep up with OS and language upgrades, bug fixes, new features, and new platforms.
Produce approximately three HDF5 releases.
Release other products as appropriate, such as the HDF5 high level libraries, and the Java libraries.
Conduct periodic releases
n 2002. aced the earlier
of a single data model that covers both formatstables.
Work on the HDF4.2r1 release is in progress. The new release will include better support for Szip compression, including support for the decoding method only, multiple bug fixes, support for PGI compilers and shared C libraries, if time and resources permit. This release is scheduled for the end of 2004.
To reduce maintenance costs of the H4toH5 library, its configuration was improved to use the GNU autoconf tools. A new release of the H4toH5 library will be conducted at the time of the HDF4.2r1 release.
There were two minor releases of HDF5 (HDF5 1.6.2 and 1.6.3), in February and October 2004. These included a number of new features and APIs, bug fixes, performance improvements for the sequential and parallel libraries, and improvements to the h5dump utility and new h5repack utility.
The High Level Fortran APIs prototype for Solaris 2.7 and Linux 2.4 with Intel F90 compiler were available for HDF Tutorial participants during the HDF-EOS VIII Workshop.
3.2.5Quality assurance
NCSA will continue to make QA an important component of all activities. Areas that will receive special emphasis are the library testing operations, documentation, the software development process, software development standards, and documentation of tests.
Considerable work continues to go into the HDF regression tests, which are run daily on a critical set of platforms, including platforms running Solaris, AIX, HP, and Linux, as well as Linux clusters. Both the sequential and parallel HDF5 libraries are tested with the latest stable versions of MPICH and vendor-provided MPI-IO libraries. Various C and Fortran compilers (Intel, PGI, Absoft) are tested rigorously along with the multiple versions of the GNU C compiler. Periodically the HDF libraries are tested on Windows, Crays, SGI Altix and Compaq cluster machines.
The HDF bugs database is revised bi-weekly and new requests are prioritized and assigned to the developers. During 2004, the HDF group switched from the MS Access bug database to the UNIX based Bugzilla database. With Bugzilla all group members have fast and easy access to the database which tremendously improved bug handling for all HDF products.
We keep improving our test coverage in the HDF product test suites. Whenever a new API function or tool is added, a new test suite for the API or tool is integrated with the HDF test suite. Because snapshots of the HDF4 and HDF5 libraries are available from the HDF ftp server for our users, friendly users are able to test the latest bug fixes against their code, and this also helps find and fix bugs. HDF group members work closely with the users who reported bugs or requested new features and proactively seek the feedback when a bug is fixed or a new feature is added.
For each release HDF library documentation is reviewed by the developers and the QA and support group.
