[wg11] Notes from the Sept 11 EXPRESS/HDF Telecon

[David Price]

The EXPRESS/Binary technical team had a telecon today. The notes follow. Note 
that we plan a walkthough of the first complete EXPRESS/HDF5 mapping the 
Thursday of the Hershey ISO meeting in October.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Notes from the Sept 11 EXPRESS/HDF Telecon
Date: Monday 11 September 2006 17:26
From: David Price <david.price at eurostep.com>
To: STEP HDF5 <hdf5step at ncsa.uiuc.edu>

Notes from the Sept 11 EXPRESS/HDF Telecon

1) HDF5 1.8 Update

HDF5 1.8 Alpha 4 is currently available for testing.

Elena went thru version 1.8 changes she thought useful to our project. Her
slides are at:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/STEP/1.8.0-update_files/frame.htm

Latest release is HDF5 1.8.0-alpha4 1.8.0 info can be found at:
http://hdfgroup.com/HDF5/release/alpha/obtain518.html

For list of new features see:
http://hdfgroup.com/HDF5/doc_1.8pre/WhatsNew180.html

Some of the new features are available in Alpha 4, some come in Alpha 5 and
some in the Beta code. Elena's slides include this information.

2) Hans-Peter explained that funding for the next pyEXPRESS testing will
likely start again in October. The two major issues raised in the previous
testing are documented in the meeting notes from the Toulouse ISO session
at http://www.exff.org/express_binary

The pyEXPRESS testing is based on the pyTables Python layer for HDF and Elena
reported that the pyTables developers are testing version 1.8.

3) PDES Offsite

Mike Folk will be presenting to the Long Term Data Retention team, as a NARA
rep, and we arranged to have a Wed morning meeting to discuss EXPRESS/HDF5 in
the Engineering Analysis team (Keith will tell the SCRA folks about this).

David will help Mike with the overview slides that introduce the EXPRESS/HDF
project.

4) Hershey ISO STEP EXPRESS/HDF plan

A one-day walkthrough of the Draft 0.5 specification is planned for the
Thursday Oct 26 at the next ISO STEP meeting. David plans to produce draft
0.5 which will include support for all EXPRESS constructs by Oct 19 in
preparation for the ISO STEP meeting. Elena is likely to attend from the HDF
Group.

The plan is to start the ISO New Work Item ballot in October with Draft 0.5
attached to show the progress.

5) Testing

It looks like we will have coverage of Python (STEP TAS), C (Vivace/Eurostep)
and Fortran (PDES EA team/AP209) which should give a wide spectrum of results
to feed into the follow-on drafts of the spec.

Cheers,
David

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