Does HDF5 support concurrent reads, or writes to different files?

Question

I'm trying to understand the limits of HDF5 concurrency.

There are two builds of HDF5: parallel HDF5 and default. The parallel version is is currently supplied in Ubuntu, and the default in Anaconda (judged by --enable-parallel flag).

I know that parallel writes to the same file are impossible. However, I don't fully understand to what extend the following actions are possible with default or with parallel build:

• several processes reading from the same file
• several processes reading from different files
• several processes writing to different files.

Also, are there any reasons anaconda does not have --enable-parallel flag on by default? (https://github.com/conda/conda-recipes/blob/master/hdf5/build.sh)

Answer 1

AFAICT, there are three ways to build libhdf5:

• with neither thread-safety nor MPI support (as in the conda recipe you posted)
• with MPI support but no thread safety
• with thread safety but no MPI support

That is, the --enable-threadsafe and --enable-parallel flags are mutually exclusive (https://www.hdfgroup.org/hdf5-quest.html#p5thread).

As for concurrent reads on one or even multiple files, the answer is that you need thread safety (https://www.hdfgroup.org/hdf5-quest.html#tsafe):

Concurrent access to one or more HDF5 file(s) from multiple threads in the same process will not work with a non-thread-safe build of the HDF5 library. The pre-built binaries that are available for download are not thread-safe.

Users are often surprised to learn that (1) concurrent access to different datasets in a single HDF5 file and (2) concurrent access to different HDF5 files both require a thread-safe version of the HDF5 library. Although each thread in these examples is accessing different data, the HDF5 library modifies global data structures that are independent of a particular HDF5 dataset or HDF5 file. HDF5 relies on a semaphore around the library API calls in the thread-safe version of the library to protect the data structure from corruption by simultaneous manipulation from different threads. Examples of HDF5 library global data structures that must be protected are the freespace manager and open file lists.

Edit: The links above no longer work because the HDF Group reorganised their website. There is a page Questions about thread-safety and concurrent access in the HDF5 Knowledge Base that contains some useful information.

While only concurrent threads on a single process are mentioned in the passage, it appears to apply equally to forked subprocesses: see this h5py multiprocessing example.

Now, for parallel access, you might want to use "Parallel HDF5" but those features requires using MPI. This pattern is supported by h5py but is more complicated and esoteric, and probably even less portable than thread-safe mode. More importantly, trying to naively do concurrent reads with a parallel build of libhdf5 will lead to unexpected results because the library isn't thread-safe.

Besides efficiency, one limitation of the thread-safe build flag is lack of Windows support (https://www.hdfgroup.org/hdf5-quest.html#gconc):

The thread-safe version of HDF5 is currently not tested or supported on MS Windows platforms. A user was able to get this working on Windows 64-bit and contributed his Windows 64-bit Pthreads patches.

Getting weird corrupt results when reading (different!) files from Python is definitely unexpected and frustrating given how concurrent read access is one of the touted "features" of HDF5. Perhaps a better default recipe for conda would be to include --enable-threadsafe on those platforms that support it, but I guess then you would end up with platform-specific behavior. Maybe there ought to be separate packages for the three build modes instead?