NetCDF/HDF5 Merger

As PI on the recently approved Unidata/NCSA proposal Merging the NetCDF and HDF5 Libraries to Achieve Gains in Performance and Interoperability, Russ Rew is working with the NASA-AIST program and co-PI Mike Folk at NCSA to begin the two-year $700K project. About $422K goes to UCAR and about $278K to NCSA. The expected award date is June 20, 2003, and Richard Ullman at the ESDIS project at Goddard has been assigned to us as the "technical officer" for the AIST award. He has been responsible for oversight of work related to EOS data format and metadata standards.

Unidata has already posted job descriptions for a new software engineer and student assistant to help carry out the work. We will be meeting with NCSA participants sometime this summer. We expect to also work with researchers at Argonne who have been making progress independently on a parallel version of netCDF.

We have also begun investigating the HDF5 data model and discussing extensions to the netCDF data model.

1. New data element types: strings, structures, vectors, and anonymous dimensions. A vector would be a variable length 1D array of any type with a length that could change.
2. Allow structure to be a user defined data type, which can be reused.
3. Multiple unlimited dimensions.
4. Support for packed data types, push scale/offset into library, allow variable bit sizes.
5. Explicit support for coordinate variables/axes.