[Users] UNH-EXS 1.3.0 Release

[Robert D. Russell]

As was presented at the user-day workshop on April 19,
UNH-EXS Version 1.3.0 was released on April 16, 2013.

The UNH EXS Version 1.3.0 distribution can be downloaded via the UNH-IOL
website at https://www.iol.unh.edu/services/research/unh-exs.
Documentation is included in the distribution, and is also available separately
at https://www.iol.unh.edu/services/research/unh-exs/exs-overview.pdf

UNH EXS was originally written by Dr. Robert Russell (rdr at iol.unh.edu)
and is currently being developed and maintained by Patrick MacArthur
(pmacarth at iol.unh.edu).

EXS is intended for application developers who want to use RDMA in
high performance computing (HPC) and other applications,
but who may not want to deal with all of the complexity
of writing programs for the RDMA verbs interface.

The Extended Sockets API (ES-API) is a specification published by the 
Open Group that defines extensions to the traditional socket API in 
order to provide asynchronous I/O and memory registration for 
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). These two major new features enable 
programmers to take advantage of today’s multi-core processors and RDMA 
network hardware, such as InfiniBand, iWARP and RoCE interfaces, in a 
convenient yet efficient manner.

The UNH EXS interface provides most of the features specified in the 
ES-API, and provides a few additional features that give the programmer 
more flexibility. For example, the programmer can choose to program with 
synchronous rather than asynchronous I/O, and/or to program with or 
without memory registration. The programmer can also conveniently “tune” 
certain aspects of the EXS interface to take advantage of application 
requirements in order to provide better performance.

UNH EXS is written in C to use the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution
(OFED) verbs library.  It runs entirely in user space, and is itself
linked as a library into application programs that use it.  It requires
no change to the Linux kernel or other libraries, such as the OFED library.
UNH EXS is open source and is available under a choice of the GNU 
General Public License (GPL) Version 2 or the BSD License.