HDF5 Binary Distribution with Stream Driver

HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format version 5) is an I/O library and file format used by Cactus to output arbitrary multidimensional data into files for postprocessing or to sockets for online visualization.

To find further information on this please refer to the Cactus HDF5-HOWTO.

From the official HDF5 home page you can download the latest version of HDF5, both as binary distribution for a number of architectures, as well as source distribution.

In order to use the streaming extensions of HDF5 you need a distribution with the Stream Virtual File Driver built-in. Such a version is not available on the HDF5 download page. So you can either build it from the source distribution (see Cactus HDF5-HOWTO for details), or simply download this HDF5 tarball for Linux x86.

This distribution contains some HDF5 utility programs in the bin/ subdirectory, as well as as the development library libhdf5.a along with include header files (in lib/ and include/ resp.). Just unpack the compressed tarball (ca. 1.8 MBytes) in your installation package directory, softlink it into one of the standard installation paths, and - for convenience - also softlink the utility programs into a standard executable path:

cd your_installation_packages_dir # eg. /usr/local/apps/
tar xzf hdf5-1.6.1-stream.tar.gz
ln -s hdf5-1.6.1/ hdf5
cd /usr/local/bin/
ln -s your_installation_packages_dir/hdf5/bin/* .

This page and the Linux binary distribution are maintained by Thomas Radke.