The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) is a binary file format designed to store large amount of numerical data.

HDF5 refers to:

  • A binary file format designed to store efficiently large amount of numerical data
  • Libraries of function to create and manipulate these files

Main features

  • Free
  • Completely portable
  • Very mature
  • No limit on the number and size of the datasets
  • Flexible in the kind and structure of the data and meta-data
  • Complete library in C and Fortran well documented
  • A lot of wrappers and tools are available ( Python, Matlab, Java, …)

Some links to get started