Review-3

Review of operational suitability of HDF-EOS5:

NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Standards Process Group (SPG) is considering the HDF-EOS5 for adoption as a community standard. This is the second review of HDF-EOS5, this one focusing on its readiness for operational use. The questions below are provided to guide feedback from data systems, application providers, instrument teams and others. You only need to answer questions applicable to you. Please send comments to spg-rfc-008@lists.nasa.gov.

1. Describe in a sentence or two your overall experience related to HDF-EOS5 (e.g., science data provider, science data systems, software tools developer, and science data user, etc).

   Our group is a provider of the HDF5 software and file format for storing scientific and other type of data. HDF-EOS5 is built on top of HDF5 for storing and manipulating remote sense data.

2. Do you currently use or plan to use HDF-EOS5 in a production setting? What types of applications do you use with HDF-EOS5? Is HDF-EOS5 applicable to your applications (e.g., Does it work well with the data types and data manipulations in your application?)

   We use HDF-EOS5 software in a regular regression testing of backward/forward compatibility of the HDF5 C library APIs and HDF5 file format.

3. Why do you choose to use HDF-EOS5 over other data formats for your applications?

   Our group is committed to provide software and file format that can be used for long-term data preservation and also can address ever-changing computational environment and exponentially growing volumes of data. HDF-EOS5 (both file format and library) is an excellent "use case" to test if HDF5 achieves both goals of long-term data preservation and availability of data in the new computational environments.

4. Have you or your users encountered any difficulty when using some of the data access or visualization tools (e.g., IDL, GrADS, ..) on HDF-EOS5 data files? If you have, please provide a brief description of your experience.

   We use HDF5 command line utilities to access data in the HDF-EOS5 files. We also use HDF Java browser HDFView and HDF-EOS5 plug-in to view the HDF-EOS5 data. We never had difficulties to access the data unless there is a serious problem in HDF5 that is addressed immediately.

5. Does the performance of HDF-EOS5 you have experienced meet your requirements? (e.g., Can it handle the data types in your applications? Does it take a long time to read and write HDF-EOS5 files?)

   To our knowledge performance is good.

   Aside note: Our group is committed to work very closely with the HDF-EOS5 development and support team to resolve any performance issues.

6. What operational challenges or limitations does HDF-EOS5 present? (e.g., Does it take a long time to learn how to use it? Does it require advanced processing power, large amounts of memory, complex configuration, etc).

   We've already addressed the problem with the HDF-EOS5 building process and the problem of portability to different computational platforms and compilers.

   HDF-EOS5 currently uses GNU autotools. It will help to reduce HDF-EOS5 maintenance cost and will improve its portability. We didn't encounter any other limitations.

7. What benefits does HDF-EOS5 present? Do the benefits of HDF-EOS5 outweigh the challenges? (e.g., Does it offer the flexibility you want to package the data types in your applications? Does it facilitate interdisciplinary studies?)

   HDF-EOS5 takes full advantage of the HDF5 library and file format. It can handle very efficiently huge volumes of data in the current and in the emerging computational environments without any changes to the HDF-EOS5 applications.

8. How much data do/will you provide or archive in HDF-EOS5? (number of distinct data products or data sets, total data volume, number of files.)

   N/A

9. How many users do you have or expect to have for data in HDF-EOS5, and what is your expected user community?

   N/A