
190 High Performance Parallel I/O
FIGURE 16.3 (See color insert): An overview of HDF5 datatypes. [Image
courtesy of Gerd Heber, The HDF Group.]
The datatype of an HDF5 dataset describes the type of the element stored
at each location of the array. Each element of a dataset must have the same
datatype, but datatypes themselves are capable of describing very complex
structures for each element. Figure 16.3 shows the categories of datatypes
and some of their capabilities. Notable features include the ability to nest
array, compound, and variable-length datatypes arbitrarily to create user-
defined integer and floating-point types, and to reference other