NetCDF development

• To: netcdfgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: NetCDF development
• From: Maurice J. LeBrun <mjl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1992 4:25:15 CDT

Hello, I am new to the list.  Just to tell everyone who I am: I am a
research associate at the Institute for Fusion Studies, University of
Texas.  I got my PhD in plasma physics 4 years ago, doing kinetic
simulation of plasmas (continuing to this day).  I've been working
extensively with computers for the last 12 years or so.  I've written a
largish (60K+ lines) plasma simulation code in MPPL (extended Fortran
variant), contributed greatly to a graphics package in C (20K lines), along
with other smaller projects. 

I recently decided to take a hard look at NetCDF to serve my needs as data
file format for large plasma simulations. 

I had previously been working on my own format, since I felt that was the
best for my purposes.  This includes: (a) a lossy form of floating point
compression, (b) faster storage of floating points than XDR on non-IEEE
machines such as Crays (this turns out to be related to (a)), and (c) file
sequencing, where a "logical" file can be created in pieces, according to
some byte limit on each file.  These features help a lot when dealing with
very large data sets (100's of MB to GB). 

On the other hand, the NetCDF package seems to be well thought out, is of a
reasonable size, and the source code seems not too difficult to follow.  So
I am considering how I might go about the task of enhancing NetCDF to do
the things I want.  Which brings me to some questions that are more
"political" than technical:

  o who are currently developing and maintaining NetCDF?

  o are "outsiders" allowed to be part of the club?

  o if so, does this include access to the central CVS or RCS repository?

  o if not, (to either of the above), how are user-contributed enhancements
  handled and how do the outside developers stay current with recent
  versions of the code? 

Your comment is greatly appreciated.
--
Maurice LeBrun    mjl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Institute for Fusion Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Emacs is a fine operating system, but I still prefer UNIX.

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