Real-Time Innovations Releases NDDS

--- For immediate release. ---

Real-Time Innovations, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) today announced the release of a revolutionary, advanced real-time network communications system called the NDDS,"Network Data Delivery Service".

The Network Data Delivery Service (NDDS) makes it easy to share data and event information. It implements a many-to-many "dissemination" communications architecture. Dissemination designs allow distributed nodes to produce data into, and subscribe to data from, a virtual "network" resource simply and naturally. NDDS handles the actual transfers, directly sending all producer updates to each subscriber. The architecture is symmetric, robust to changes and failures, and very efficient.

This differs radically from older "point-to-point" (e.g. TCP) and
"client-server" (e.g. RPC) designs. These designs suffer from complex connection and error recovery problems, central bottlenecks, and single points of failure. They only make sense in a real-time system when the information to be shared is limited to a few nodes (point-to-point) or is naturally, centrally located client-server). While appropriate for transaction processing or file servers, these designs are often not a good match to real-time systems.

In contrast, dissemination architectures excel when the information itself is distributed, or when the data flow between nodes is complex. Systems that use dissemination architectures tend to be very modular, as information is easy to use regardless of the number of nodes involved. Configuration changes and even node failures do not disrupt the data flow. Many-to-many communications allows programs to be replicated (e.g. multiple GUIs) and moved transparently with no extra effort. Backup "hot standby" processors can coexist on the same network with no change in the design.

Real-Time Innovations' NDDS (Network Data Delivery Service) is the first
dissemination architecture designed expressly for real-time ommunications. It implements a true real-time model, offering update guarantees and deadlines. It supports both best efforts data streams (for "last is best" semantics) and reliable data streams (for "command" semantics).

A typical application, such as patient monitoring, factory automation and robotics, or distributed games and simulations that would have taken thousands of lines of network or RPC code can be done with a few NDDS library calls. In addition, the NDDS design will support replicated nodes (e.g. many GUIs), be robust to network changes and failures, run faster, allow moving programs from processor to processor ransparently, and be much more modular and understandable.

NDDS was developed over the last three years in a joint research effort with Stanford University. It is currently available on Sun, HP, DEC, and SGI workstations, and on VxWorks for 68k, x86, Sparc, MIPS, i960, Alpha, AM29k and PowerPC (beta) processors. A port to Windows will be available shortly. It is already being used in many sites, and was recently selected after an extensive evaluation of six competing products for all real-time networking needs of the Department of Energy. A development license starts at $6500.

NDDS will change the way you think about distributed applications.

---For further information, contact "info@rti.com", or call (408) 720-8312.
Extremely aggressive academic discount program available.