Unidata and NCSA collaborate to merge NetCDF and HDF5
=====================================================

Last week it was announced that a joint Unidata/NCSA project has been  
awarded funding under NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology 
(AIST) Program.  This project is led by PI Russ Rew of Unidata, in 
close collaboration with the NCSA HDF team.

Unidata and NCSA will collaborate to create netCDF-4, using HDF5 as its 
storage layer.  Users of netCDF in numerical models will benefit from 
advanced features available in HDF5, including support for packed data, 
large datasets, and parallel I/O. Users of HDF5 will benefit from the 
availability of a simpler high-level interface suitable for 
array-oriented scientific data, wider use of the HDF5 data format, and 
the wealth of netCDF software for data management, analysis and 
visualization that has evolved among the large netCDF user community. 
See also:

   http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/whatsnew.html