The DP Library Project

Overview:

The DP project grew out of a number of experiences I had writing distributed applications. The core of the DP project is the development of the DP library, which contains a set of routines that facilitates the development of portable distributed applications.

DP is in that family of libraries and environments whose most widespread example is PVM. DP differs from PVM in a numbers of ways:
  1. DP supports both light-weight and interrupting messages.
  2. DP's implementation permits a certain degree of fault-tolerance.
  3. DP's interface is simpler.
The DP library has both a C and Fortran interface.

DP is designed to be a low-level semantically, with the expectation that higher level libraries will be built on top of it. A fairly trivial example of such a library is XDP; another example, which is still under development, is STDDP.

There are several on-going projects involving DP:
  1. Integrating DP and 2LP (a contraint-based logic programming language).
  2. Exploring parallel random number generation suitable for distribute computations.
  3. Implementing a portable C-Linda on top of DP.


For more information, see the DP man pages or the resources listed below. Also, you might check DP for Students.

Papers:

Talks:

Winter 95 USENIX Conference
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