mobile-logo

April 2015

Elena Pourmal, The HDF Group What happened to my compression? One of the most powerful features of HDF5 is the ability to compress or otherwise modify, or “filter,” your data during I/O. By far, the most common user-defined filters are ones that perform data compression.  As you know, there are many compression options. There are filters provided by the HDF5 library (“predefined filters,”) which include several types of filters for data compression, data shuffling and checksum. Users can implement their own “user-defined filters” and employ them with the HDF5 library. [caption id="attachment_10741" align="alignright" width="300"] Cars in a 1973 Philadelphia junkyard – image from National Archives and Records Administration[/caption] While the programming model and usage of the compression filters is straightforward, it is possible for...

April 23, 2015

...we focus on how far we can push our personal computing devices with Spark. It consists of 7,850 HDF-EOS5 files covering 27 years and totals about 120 GB. We use a driver script, which reads a dataset of interest from each file in the collection, computes per-file quantities of interest, and gathers them in a CSV file for visualization. The processing time on our reference tablet machine for 3.5 years of data using 4 logical processors was about 10 seconds....

April 16, 2015

Mohamad Chaarawi, The HDF Group

First in a series: parallel HDF5

What costs applications a lot of time and resources rather than doing actual computation?  Slow I/O.  It is well known that I/O subsystems are very slow compared to other parts of a computing system.  Applications use I/O to store simulation output for future use by analysis applications, to checkpoint application memory to guard against system failure, to exercise out-of-core techniques for data that does not fit in a processor’s memory, and so on.  I/O middleware libraries, such as HDF5, provide application users with a rich interface for I/O access to organize their data and store it efficiently.  A lot of effort is invested by such I/O libraries to reduce or completely hide the cost of I/O from applications.

Parallel I/O is one technique used to access data on disk simultaneously from different application processes to maximize bandwidth and speed things up. There are several ways to do parallel I/O, and I will highlight the most popular methods that are in use today.

Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus. Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois.

First, to leverage parallel I/O, it is very important that you have a parallel file system;

April 9, 2015

HDF Group has just announced “HDF Server” - a freely available service that enables remote access to HDF5 content using a RESTful API. In our scenario, using HDF Server, we upload our Monopoly simulation results to the server and then interested parties can make requests for any desired content to the server - no file size issues, no downloading entire files...

April 2, 2015