Using and Installing HDF5

HDF5 is a library for high-performance parallel data output. Deal.II can use it to write graphical solutions. They can be displayed using paraview for example.

This is how you can download, configure, and build hdf5:

wget http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/current/src/hdf5-1.8.9.tar.gz
tar xf hdf5-1.8.9.tar.gz
cd hdf5-1.8.9/
./configure --prefix=`pwd`/build/ -enable-parallel
make install
    
You will end up with a script called h5pcc (or h5cc if you decided to not build the parallel version) in the build/bin directory.

Interfacing deal.II to HDF5

To be able to use the interface of deal.II for HDF5 we then configure deal.II with the following additional option: --with-hdf5=path/to/hdf5/build/bin/h5pcc