Home

The hdf5_archive project provides a new serialization archive format based on HDF5 to complement the ones already included in the boost::serialization library: plain text, XML, and native binary. By building on the established and well-known boost::serialization framework, application code can use HDF5 or switch to any of the other established archive formats with only minimal changes to the code involved.

HDF5 has become a popular format to store scientific data. It is open and well-documented. Further advantages of HDF5 are the following:

• the format is self-describing and portable across computing platforms
• efficient storage of large arrays, parallel IO using MPI is possible (though not yet implemented)
• hierarchical description of stored data
• several low-level storage drivers, including single file or multiple-directory layouts
• APIs to C, C++, and Fortran