Elepar releases Cooperative Data Sharing (CDS) as Open Sourc

Elepar, a company specializing in software tools for Grid, P2P, parallel, and distributed computing, today released the "BCR" flavor of its Cooperative Data Sharing (CDS) technology as open source software. CDS is a portable heterogeneous communication interface which offers the best of both messaging (e.g. message passing) and shared memory in a flexible and simple-to-understand interface.

"We considered the long-term goals of the CDS project, to provide an interface which would instill confidence by being efficient and robust on a great number of different platforms, from Grids to clusters to SMPs to distributed and massively parallel machines," said Dr. David
DiNucci, president of Elepar and the designer/implementor of the CDS interface. "We realized that in the context of so many potential platforms and application areas, open source was the natural solution." Elepar will remain available for contract-based development, consulting, and support.

CDS was originally designed and prototyped by Dr. DiNucci when he worked at the NAS Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, under contract with MRJ. After leaving NASA and forming Elepar, Dr.
DiNucci re-implemented that earlier design with a few extensions to simplify its use on heterogeneous platforms. That became known as
"BCR" ("Before CDS Redesign") to differentiate it from redesigned interfaces which Elepar has already begun to consider. (For easy recall, "BCR" is also alphabetically parallel to "CDS".) Elepar's BCR forms this open source release.

CDS is a high-performance alternative to other communication interfaces. It not only eliminates the textual conversion and parsing inherent in SOAP-based messaging, but can often avoid all
data conversion overhead on homogeneous platforms, and can even eliminate copying altogether in some cases when the communicating entities happen to be on the same machine. DiNucci continued, "We hope that users of other common communication interfaces--like sockets, MPI, PVM, and distributed shared memory--will consider CDS, and how it might be tailored to meet their needs if it doesn't already. Likewise, we hope that developers will consider porting CDS to maximally exploit the features present in high-performance communication architectures."

The open source BCR version can be found on SourceForge at
http://cds-bcr.sourceforge.net
and Elepar's CDS resources continue to be located on its website at
http://www.elepar.com/CDS/
The software is released under the so-called "MIT" license, which is very unrestrictive, and does not contain copyleft provisions. This release is built to work with the C language, on IP-based networks, and has been tested on ethernet-based clusters of Pentium, PowerPC, and Sparc machines, some in SMP configurations.