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Introductory Topics Questions
Section 2: HDF File Organization
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1. Name and describe the two primary objects that can be stored in an HDF5
file:
2. What is an attribute?
3. Give the path name for an object called "harry" that is a member of a
group called "dick," which in turn is a member of the root group.
Section 3: The HDF5 API
=======================
Describe the purpose of each of the following HDF5 APIs:
H5A, H5D, H5E, F5F, H5G, H5T, H5Z
Section 4: Creating an HDF File
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1. What two HDF5 routines must be called in order to create an HDF5 file?
2. What include file must be included in any file that uses the HDF5 library.
3. An HDF5 file is never completely empty because as soon as an HDF5 file
is created, it automatically contains a certain primary object. What is
that object?
Section 5: Creating a Dataset
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1. Name and describe two major datatype categories.
2. List the HDF5 atomic datatypes. Give an example of a predefined datatype.
3. What does the dataspace describe? What are the major characteristics of the
simple dataspace?
4. What information needs to be passed to the H5Dcreate function, i.e.
what information is needed to describe a dataset at creation time?
Section 6: Reading from/Writing to a Dataset
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1. What are six pieces of information which need to be specified for
reading and writing a dataset?
2. Why are both the memory dataspace and file dataspace needed for
read/write operations, but only the memory datatype is specified for the
datatype?
3. What does the line DATASPACE { SIMPLE (4 , 6 ) / ( 4 , 6 ) } in Fig 6.1
means?
Section 7: Creating an Attribute
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1. What is an attribute?
2. Can partial I/O operations be performed on attributes?
Section 8: Creating a Group
===========================
What are the two primary objects that can be included in
a group?
Section 9: Creating Groups using Absolute/Relative Names
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1. Group names can be specified in two "ways". What are these
two types of group names that you can specify?
2. You have a dataset named "moo" in the group "boo", which is
in the group "foo", which in turn, is in the root group. How would
you specify an absolute name to access this dataset?
Section 10: Creating Datasets in Groups
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Describe a way to access the dataset "moo" described in the previous section
(Section 9, question 2), using a relative and absolute pathname.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
hdfhelp@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Last Modified: August 2, 1999