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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Orion Poplawski <orion@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > On 10/19/2009 08:36 AM, Ed Hartnett wrote: > > <stephen.pascoe@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > > Restricting CMIP contributors from using szip makes perfect sense. (But > > everyone who asked me for it was from the climate community!) Yet the > > szlib library is freely available, and license restrictions on > > commercial writers of data will not apply to anyone in the CMIP5 > > community. > > Note that SZIP is not acceptable in Fedora and will not be available in > the stock Fedora versions. > > We used SZIP earlier on at GMAO in the context of HDF-4. On the positive side, SZIP compression was much faster and most of the files were a bit smaller. On the downside, people had difficulty reading our files. For example, the IDL and Matlab bindings did not include SZIP support, forcing people to do a file conversion before using our data. In the end, it was too much trouble that we decided to abandon SZIP compression altogether. So, I echo your concerns, using SZIP for data distribution is a bad idea. I can see it being useful inside institutional walls for performance critical applications. Therefore, it makes sense for the NetCDF library to have it as an option. Arlindo da Silva NASA/GSFC/GMAO
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