Free hdf5 software for linux

NetCDF is a format developed at Unidata that was inspired by the CDF format from NASA.
NetCDF stands for "Network Common Data Form" and is a self-describing data format, commonly used in scientific and engineering applications.
Main features:
- All features of netCDF 3.6
- Large file support (> 2 GB data files)
- Use of HDF5 for storage
- Backward file-format compatibility
- Backward API compatibility
- Parallel I/O
- Multiple unlimited dimensions
- Additional Data Types
- Hierarchical Grouping of Data
- Bit packing
- Compression and other filters
- Revised documentation
- Examples
- Distribution with both netCDF and HDF5 packages
- (Unicode/ASCII) String data type
- Anonymous dimensions
- Support for compound data types, including nested compound types
- User-defined data type
- Upgrades to ncgen/ncdump/CDL to reflect new features
- NcML support for ncgen/ncdump
- F90 interface
- C++ interface
- Demonstrable performance gains in modeling contexts on advanced architectures
- HDF5 file driver support
Whats New in 4.0 Alpha 11 Development Release:
- Enum type added.
- NetCDF-4 verified support of common data model.
- ncdump support new features and NcML.
- No netCDF-4 artifacts in file.
- Uses HDF5 creation order information.
- NetCDF-4 documentation complete.
Whats New in 3.6.2 Stable Release:
- Support for shared libraries was added.
- Major documentation additions were done.
- Speedups were made on little-endian machines.
- Minor bugs were fixed.

Hierarchical Data Format is a general purpose library and file format for storing scientific data.
HDF5 can store two primary objects: datasets and groups. A dataset is essentially a multidimensional array of data elements, and a group is a structure for organizing objects in an HDF5 file. Using these two basic objects, one can create and store almost any kind of scientific data structure, such as images, arrays of vectors, and structured and unstructured grids. You can also mix and match them in HDF5 files according to your needs.
Efficient storage and I/O.
HDF5 was created to address the data management needs of scientists and engineers working in high performance, data intensive computing environments. As a result, the HDF5 library and format emphasize storage and I/O efficiency. For instance, the HDF5 format can accommodate data in a variety of ways, such as compressed or chunked. And the library is tuned and adapted to read and write data efficiently on parallel computing systems.
Software.
NCSA maintains a suite of free, open source software, including the HDF5 I/O library and several utilities. The HDF5 user community also develops and contributes software, much of it freely available. Unlike HDF4, there is little commercial support for HDF5 at this time, but we are successfully working with vendors to change this.
Emphasis on standards.
Data can be stored in HDF5 in an endless variety of ways, so it is important for communities of users to standardize on how their data is to be organized in HDF5. This makes it possible to share data easily, and also to build and share tools for accessing and analyzing data stored in HDF5. The NCSA HDF team works with users to encourage them to organize HDF5 files in standard ways.
Large and varied user community.
HDF5 users range across a variety of engineering and scientific fields, and even some non-technical fields. Data stored in HDF5 is used for a wide range of applications, from computational fluid dynamics to film making.
Main features:
- Parallel HDF5 - Information on installing and using Parallel HDF5
- SZIP Compression - Information about SZIP Compression in HDF5
- Thread Safe HDF5 - Information on thread-safe capabilities of HDF5 and how to install
- The High Level HDF5 APIs, previously distributed separately, are now distributed as part of the main HDF5 Library:
- High Level HDF5 APIs - Information on installing and using the High Level HDF5 APIs
Applications:
- HDF Java Products - HDF4/HDF5 Java interfaces and viewer, HDFView.
- HDF Web-browser Plug-in - The HDF Web-browser plug-in is a windowed browser plug-in that is launched from a web browser to display HDF4 and HDF5 files.
- netCDF-4 - The NCSA and NetCDF groups are collaborating on a version of NetCDF built on top of HDF5.
- HDF5 XML Information Page - DTD and tools for using HDF5 with XML
- HDF5 WRF I/O Module - I/O module that reads HDF5 datasets for the Weather Research and Forecasting Model
- HDF5 Mesh API (prototype) - API for storing and retrieving structured and unstructured mesh data
Enhancements:
- The default Fortran was switched to G95 when using GCC.
- The autoconf build tools were updated. Fortran interfaces were added for the Image, Table, and Lite APIs.
- A Dimension Scale API (H5DS) was added.
- FreeBSD is now supported on AMD64 with GNU C and Fortran compilers.
- Support for sequential and parallel libraries was added for Intel 64 Linux clusters.
- Several bugs with writing fill values for datasets that have a variable-length datatype or component datatype were fixed.

OpenScientist is an integration of open source products working together to do scientific visualization and data analysis, in particular for high energy physics (HEP).
The project is definitely NOT one million lines of intricated and unnecessary complicated home made code reinventing everything.
Motivations
Experiments in high energy and nuclear physics need to be at the edge of computing technologies but at the same time have to face a very long life time (LHC experiments are going to be a matter of decades). This involves that the software must be organized in a way that permits to include or discard some technologies in an easy way without having to recode everything at each change of a piece.
For data analysis, the HEP community had used the CERN/PAW tool for years. Whilst this program had been used and is probably still used by hundred of physicists in the world, it is not any more maintained by the lab that created and promoted it : CERN. This lab had not been able to establish long term collaborative software engineering plans in order to have a technical follow up of this program and analysis tools in general. (What is astounding, is that the same people that were behind CERN/PAW come now with another tool (ROOT) which has exactly the same engineering defects).
OpenScientist is first of all an architecture trying to handle the problem differently to avoid upseting huge software phase transitions in the future. The key points of the system are the modularity and the openness. See the Languages, Coarse graining architecture, and The file formats intrinsic pain section for more about the technical choices and design.
Enhancements:
- An HDF5 driver was introduced in BatchLab.
- The build system was replaced with obuild.
- Support for CoinPython was added.
- Initial support was added for both Qt4 and SDL.
- Examples were added.
- Assorted code cleanups and speedups were done.