S-Lang HDF5 module released

Dear Colleagues,

The first public release of the SLang HDF5 module is now available:

   http://space.mit.edu/cxc/software/slang/modules/slh5
	
HDF5 is widely used in data- and CPU-intensive science and engineering
projects -- such as the FLASH simulator of thermonuclear explosions in
stars -- because it combines data and compiler portability with very
high performance, scalability to terabyte-size datasets, and support
for parallel I/O.

SLh5 boils the complexity of the HDF5 interface -- which consists of
hundreds of functions -- down to a few simple methods, making it very
easy to create S-Lang arrays from HDF5 files or vice versa.  With one
exception, the top-level SLh5 interface has been vectorized by the
SLIRP code generator; this allows multiple HDF5 files to be opened or
created, or multiple datasets or attributes to be read, in a single
call.

ISIS users may thus incorporate HDF5 data within their analysis, with
substantially smaller and cleaner code than is possible through other
means, e.g. IDL (tm), and with potentially considerable I/O performance
advantages.  For example, as described at

   http://space.mit.edu/CXC/software/slang/modules/slirp/vec-hdf5.pdf

we've used SLh5 internally to read the adaptive mesh refinement output
of hydrodynamics simulations generated by FLASH.  The AMR reader based
on SLh5 is markedly shorter and faster than the IDL (tm) FLASH reader,
and facilitates the use of hydro simulations as source models for multi-
dimensional modeling experiments in ISIS.  We've also employed HDF5 as
the transport format for 3D volume data used for visualization and
qualitative diagnostics in such modeling, and are looking for other
potential use cases from the X-ray community.

Regards,
Michael S. Noble
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