Re: swarm rpm for RH7.1

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "MA" == Myriam Abramson <address@hidden> writes:

MA> What does hdf5 do?

The HDF5 support in Swarm is a way to load and save the state of a
simulation.  It can efficiently preserve a hierarchy of agents, and
can be used to store data streams from agents to disk.  HDF5 is library
independent of Swarm that works with other packages, such a statistical
software like R (http://www.r-project.org).  It has benefits over text files
such as:

  1) random access to data

  2) Data streams can be compressed incrementally. 

  3) precise typing -- the exact floating point representation is tagged in
     a HDF5 file.  E.g. if you read and write the textual representation of
     a number, you can get slightly different results across machines

  4) Fast loading and saving of data in native form.  On a system where
     you create and consume the files, there are no conversions needed,
     you just read in the binary data.
     Conversions are done on demand when there are endian differences.   

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