A workshop was given on the HDF5 file format by James Harrison and Rory Brown as part of the Advanced Computational Methods II course. HDF5 is a hierarchical file format that allows that allows various types of data and metadata to be stored in the same file. It has a huge amount of structural versatility and can even be used for parallel applications.
A few terminal commands for observing these files were covered including a command that allows the user to display some or all the information contained within the file and another which allows copying of sections of the file to other locations in another or the same file. The h5py interface to HDF5 files was also discussed, which is a python module that allows some quite in-depth manipulation such as versatile creation tools.
All materials for the workshop can be found on the computational modelling blog here.
Posted by James Harrison