Common Data Format (CDF)

The Common Data Format (CDF) is a self-describing data format for the storage and manipulation of scalar and multidimensional data in a platform- and discipline-independent fashion. When one first hears the term "Common Data Format" one intuitively thinks of data formats in the traditional (i.e. messy/convoluted storage of data on disk or tape) sense of the word. Although CDF has its own internal self describing format, it consists of more than just a data format. CDF is a scientific data management package (known as the "CDF Library") which allows programmers and application developers to manage and manipulate scalar, vector, and multi-dimensional data arrays. The irony of the term "FORMAT" is that the actual data format which CDF utilizes is completely transparent to the user and accessible through a consistent set of interface (known as the "CDF Interface") routines. Therefore, programmers are not burdened with performing low level I/O's to physically format and unformat the data file. This is all done for them automatically.

Please send an email to cdfsupport@listserv.gsfc.nasa.gov for any CDF related questions (both technical and policy related).

Announcements

The latest CDF release is V3.2.4. This is the Version Release Change Logs .
CDF latest release
CDF Patch for Matlab
CDF Patch for IDL 6 and 7 (strongly recommended)
CDF's Java Network Launching Protocol latest development

Introductory Information about CDF

Value Added Service

Data Translation Web Service Information
Data Translation Web Service (DTWS) client - interactive data format translation service

Space Physics Users of CDF

To make ISTP compliant CDFs look at Space Physics Use of CDF
Public Domain and Commercial Software for CDF

Obtaining CDF software and documentation

Access to the latest CDF software and documentation is available via anonymous FTP on cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov. Below is a listing of the various platforms and operating systems supported by CDF:

DEC Alpha/OSF1 & OpenVMS
DECstation/ULTRIX & VMS
HP 9000 series/HP-UX
PC Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, Solaris, Cygwin, MinGW & QNX
IBM RS600 series/AIX
Macintosh OS X 10.3 or a later version
NeXT/Mach
SGI Iris, Power series and Indigo/IRIX
Sun/SunOS & SOLARIS
VAX/VMS

The above systems are fully supported for CDF 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7. CDF 3.0 or later is supported on all the platforms listed above except for the IBM AIX, HP-UX, and SGI Irix operating systems (due to lack of interest and hardware). If you need to run CDF 3.0 or later on these operating systems, please contact cdfsupport@listserv.gsfc.nasa.gov. Please note that the most recent updates and maintenance may only go into the latest release version. Contact the cdfsupport for any special requests.

CDF Documentation and Information
Download the latest version of CDF Software Distribution (V3.2.4)
Download the beta version of CDF Software Distribution and Documenation (V3.3.0)
Download the older, no longer maintained CDF Software Distribution
CDF Anonymous FTP Site

Sybase-to-CDF: This Perl script is written by the Gravity Probe B team at the Stanford University, and it extracts data from a Sybase database to CDF format using the Perl DBI and CDF Perl modules.
Speedups for reading CDF files in MATLAB: This patch (donated by Dr. Robert Weigel at GMU) reads all the CDF records at once, and it's significantly faster than the MATLAB's CDFREAD function.
MySQL-to-CDF: This Perl script is written by Dr. Joshua Shaffer at the Drexel University. It enumerates all the attributes in a given relation, creates the corresponding CDF structure, and dumps the MySQL data into the CDF file. It uses Perl DBI, but it can be adapted to work with other DBD drivers.