HDF has contributed solutions to data management challenges in the aerospace industry for more than a decade. No company has capitalized on the power and flexibility of HDF better than Boeing, which uses HDF in wide range of applications.
In turn, the challenges for high end data management that we have learned about from Boeing have been directly responsible for a number of exciting additions and improvements to HDF, particularly to HDF5.
The HDF Group has received support from Boeing for a number of applications. This support has led to major improvements in HDF performance, portability, and functionality, much of it directly benefiting the broader community of HDF users.
Image database.
In the late 90's, a project with Boeing/McDonnell Douglas developed the capability to extract sequences of images from large image-data stores that meet specific, user-defined criteria. The high-speed search engine was coupled with a very efficient interactive form of workstation-based data visualization.OpenVMS.
The multi-platform interoperability of HDF has proved invaluable to a group at Boeing that has OpenVMS as an important part of their family of systems. This group has used HDF4 on VMS for many years, and has in recent years support a port of all Fortran and C APIs in the HDF5 library to the Alpha OpenVMS versions of those languages. The port also includes certain tools, including conversion utilities for converting from HDF4 to HDF5 and from HDF5 to HDF4.Flight test data.
The capabilities of HDF5 to handle both large and complex data at high speed makes it an ideal format for dealing with the thousands of channels of data that accrue during flight testing. Military, as well as commercial projects at Boeing have supported The HDF Group in projects involving flight test data for data acquisition, archiving, analysis and visualization, and general data management.In some instances, The HDF Group provides consultation to Boeing on how best to take advantage of HDF5 for managing flight text data. In others, we have made important changes to HDF5 to accommodate Boeing flight test data requirements. In the process new APIs have been implemented, including "HDF5 packet tables" for fast data acquisition by packet. A second API has been implemented, "HDF Time-History," for organizing and accessing time sequenced data, but this is not yet publicly available. During this time, Boeing has also supported The HDF Group in adding prototype filter to HDF5 to support dataset encryption.
Many exciting projects Boeing are currently being discussed, and we look forward to sharing the results with you as they happen.
- - Last modified:November 04th 2008