November 20, 2000

Printer ready

Mithral Project Looks Beyond Project-Splitting

By Andy Patrizio

Send Us Your Feedback

ithral Communications & Design Inc. has peer-to-peer and distributed computing ambitions that surpass even those of Groove Networks Inc., but one thing it doesn't have is a recognized industry name such as Ray Ozzie behind it. So the principals at Mithral forge ahead on their own.

The Cosm Project created by Mithral is a large-scale development effort to create a distributed computing platform that does more than just slice up a massive computation project and split it among computers. The project is focused on a number of elements, including a unified security model, interprocess communication, a name and directory service, and scheduling of processes.

The Cosm software developers' kit for building applications is just one facet of the project. It can be used to build your own Napster and comes with sample code to create just that, or you can create your own SETI@Home, similar to the Stanford University Folding@Home project, which simulates how genomes form proteins. The Cosm developers' kit does much of the work for you if you want to create these types of applications. "We're trying to make application development easy again," says Duncan Beberg, Mithral's chief technology officer.

The developers' kit consists of three parts. The first is a CPU/OS layer, which lets developers create portable applications. The Cosm kit supports more than 20 operating systems and CPUs. The second is the Utility layer, which handles common functions such as compression, cryptography, and networking. The third is a client-server kit that has a series of templates for creating distributed applications.

The code to the developers' kit is written in C and supports C, C++, and Fortran legacy code. The first customer to build a distributed computing program with the SDK, Stanford University, simply plugged in Fortran code for simulating how proteins are formed, and went from there. "We could whip up an application in a week with this kit," says Vijay Pande, the project leader of the protein-simulation project.

The server-side of the client-server kit dishes out the data that has to be processed, receives completed work, and tracks all of the participants in a distributed computing project. It can be done in a simple flat file or it can use an Open Database Connectivity-compliant database such as Oracle and SQL Server.

The developers' kit source code is fully available but isn't released under the GNU General Public License or any other open source license. Because these licenses require developers to release their modifications, that would mean every user would have to release his own modifications, including the code used to do processing jobs, and no one wants to do that, Beberg says.

The Cosm developers' kit has a dual license, one for research and one for commercial projects. The research license allows free use, provided the code and results are published and the research is contributing to human knowledge. No royalty to Mithral is required for research use. The commercial license doesn't require a code release, but it does require a royalty depending on the content being shared by the application.

Mithral's next product will probably be a firewall bypass kit, Beberg says, which will let distributed and peer-to-peer applications work through a firewall so two clients can communicate. He says the company is also working to build more kits for writing different kinds of peer-to-peer applications.

close this window

Illustration by Claudia Newell

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---