Data Distribution Service | Vortex OpenSplice

Vortex OpenSplice enables data to be shared and integrated across a wide spectrum of operating systems and platforms. It provides a full implementation of both the OMG DDS latest rev1.4 (DCPS profiles) and the OMG-DDSI / RTPS v2.3 interoperable wire-protocol standards. It is targeted for use with server-class (desktops, racks etc.) platforms as well as more specialized real-time embedded environments and operating systems (e.g. single board computer running VxWorks).
Vortex Opensplice is fully interoperable with Cyclone DDS, Vortex Link and and Vortex Insight .

The Vortex OpenSplice product contains the complete DDS feature-set and tools provided by ADLINK. Furthermore, it contains the latest feature improvements, the most effective performance enhancements and the latest bug fixes.

The Commercial edition of Vortex Opensplice is made of the Vortex OpenSplice Core as well as ( Commercial Off-The-Self) COTS Add-ons and extra-features. The Vortex OpenSplice Core is common to both the DDS Community and the Vortex OpenSplice Editions.

The Commercial edition covers a large spectrum of Operating Systems, ranging from many Linux flavours or Windows platforms to more Realtime OSs such VxWorks and partitioned OS hypervisors such as PikeOS. Other OSs can be supported on-demand. The Vortex OpenSplice Edition requires an active support subscription or an ADLINK Commercial License.

The Commercial Software Add-ons

The Vortex OpenSplice commercial software add-ons list contains, a set of power productivity Tools and Services, additional features to enhance scalability, security, performance and extra APIs to support additional communication paradigms. It also comes with the complete set of connectors to 3rd party technologies.

The Add-ons list contains:

The Tuner Tool, which helps tune the Quality-of-Services (QoSs), perform white box testing, and visualise all the DDS data, statistics, QoSs as seen by the application. The Tuner helps you create at the runtime, DDS entities to inject or consume data that is published in the DDS data space and tune the Quality of Services.
The Tester Tool, which enables you to monitor all the DDS domain computational objects, data, QoSs, the DDS aware Applications, and DDS artefacts at the scale of the entire network. Tester allows you also to perform black box Testing through a set of user defined scripts using a simplified scripting language.
The Configurator Tool allows you to separate clearly your DDS development cycle from the deployment cycle of your system. This is achieved by gathering all your system, network and the environment details and generating a deployment descriptor in XML. With the Configurator tool, you write your application code once, and you deploy it everywhere.
The Launcher Tool, helps to get started easily with the Vortex OpenSplice product by providing a Control Panel of all the tools and utilities, the DDS examples of the most common application patterns in DDS, as well as the full documentation of the APIs and Tools and deployment tunings.
The Record and Replay Service is a non-intrusive DDS service that helps you Record the data you are interested in and Replay it later-on with the same - or with different- characteristics such data dissemination rates, QoSs, and configurations.
The Record and Replay Manager, which is a graphical user interface tool to help you configure and monitor the Record and Replay Services.
The Federated Architecture deployment feature, where the DDS infrastructure can be shared as a federation between all applications running on the same machine in order to enhance scalability and determinism. Typically, an in-memory database is created within a shared memory segment where data is stored in a balanced-tree on behalf of all the collocated applications running on the same machine. In such deployment, a Network scheduler will manage all the traffic of the collocated applications to prioritise the data and to allocate the network bandwidth to the most critical and urgent data streams.
The Shared Memory monitor tool, that helps you monitor the Shared Memory database used by OpenSplice in a federated deployment scenario. This tool supports you watching the current state of the shared memory or the memory usage peak reached as well as many other useful statistics.
The RMI API. As a polymorphic middleware, Vortex OpenSplice covers both the Data Centric Requirements as well as the Service Oriented Architecture requirements. When your architecture requires a Request-Reply type of interaction or a pure RPCs (Remote Procedure Call), the RMI ( Remote Method Invocation) can be used to offer a high abstraction programming model and enhance the productivity of your development teams. You can therefore build an architecture that takes advantage of the service centricity while keep enjoying benefits of the data centricity.
The Streams API. When the application produces continuous data streams at high frequency, batching the data together to lower the I/Os can make the difference in terms of performance and throughput. The stream APIs is a layer built on top of the standard DCPS interfaces that preserves DDS interoperability protocol from any proprietary extension.,
The Google ProtoBuff data modelling support. The Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanisms for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. Vortex OpenSplice supports GPB.
The DDS Security support, allows you to encrypt your sensitive data, authenticate the DDS applications and authorise them to access the DDS data topics and partitions. You can use the default encryption, authentication or access control plug-ins, or provide yours to be integrated.
The Ultra-Scalable Durability Service assures data consistency even in case of faults, crashes or disconnections. The eventually consistent data model is always guaranteed.
The Realtime Networking Service Protocol is a fully interoperable protocol with the OMG ddsi protocol that comes with enhanced features to increase determinism and scalability. Features such as static discovery, traffic-shaping and differentiated services capabilities are provided.
The Database Connectors to federate the real-time DDS Global data space with the on-disk data stored managed by ODBC compliant relational databases.
The MATLAB, Simulink and LabVIEW connectors, to unify the simulation and design worlds with real-time data spaces.
The Web Connectivity, through Javascript Node.js based technology to unify the real-time data spaces to the World Wide Web spaces. With such connector you can produce or get access to data from your preferred web browser, or from any Javascript standalone program.

Vortex OpenSplice is fully interoperable with any ddsi V2.3 implementation, including Cyclone DDS, and fully compatible and operational with the Vortex Link and Vortex Insight Monitoring ADLINK products. Further details on these products and Add-ons can be downloaded separately.

Vortex OpenSplice can be used as a Software Development Kit or it can be integrated with 3rd party MDA (Modern Driven Architecture Tools) that implements UML Profile for DDS applications.

In wide distributed systems the Network and the CPUs (Central Processing Units) are considered the most critical resources. As such, they are deemed the main bottleneck of the overall system performance.

In Real-time systems, CPUs orchestration and scheduling are controlled by the Operation System scheduler who has very limited capabilities to control the Network, neither the Computer’s Network Interface Cards nor the Network Routers in use. This lack of network scheduling is problematic when you need to prioritize the data flows.

To take advantage of multicore computing architectures and to address the lack of network scheduling that can manage the data at the DDS level based on its Urgency and Importance, it is crucial to come up with a DDS architecture that can Federate all the applications running on the same computing unit and orchestrate their data dissemination based on their Quality of Services (QoS).

Associating QoS to data enables the DDS infrastructure to pre-empt the low-priority traffic in favor of the one with the highest-priority and the most urgent. On the other hand, when there is little processing to factorize and federate, the classical way to implement DDS as a set of libraries you link your application code within a Single Process mode can be good enough.

The Single process architecture mode is typically recommended when only a singleton application is running on a given computer.

The Vortex OpenSplice architecture can operate and get deployed in two, fully interoperable, modes:

In a Federated mode, for complex architectures where each computer hosts several DDS aware applications.
In a library based Standalone, single process mode, when, typically, only one application is using DDS and there is nothing to federate or orchestrate.

Vortex OpenSplice Deployment Modes

Federated Architecture with Shared Memory and Network Scheduling

To rationalize the memory resources when several DDS aware applications are running on the same node, Vortex OpenSplice architecture can support shared memory to minimize the need to keep the data in the address space of each application. The shared memory segment is common to all the local DDS applications; it can be seen as an in-memory real-time database that can be queried using SQL (Structured Query Language). The Federated architecture with shared memory option has also the advantage to have an ultra-low latency inter-core communication.

When configuring Vortex OpenSplice for the Federated deployment architecture, data is physically stored only once on a machine’s federation. A smart administration still provides each subscriber within the federation with his own private 'view' on the data space. This allows a reader’s data cache to be perceived as an individual 'database' that can be content-filtered, queried, etc.

Vortex OpenSplice also has a unique architecture in the market that offers a DDS Network Scheduler in order to:

Organize and Classify the data based on its Importance and Urgency, and creates network channels for each urgent and important data stream class. These channels are called to priority lanes.
Pre-empt the less urgent data streams and allocate the network bandwidth to the highest priority, most up-to-date, and most urgent data stream, as it is defined in the QoS attached to each data stream.
Perform traffic shaping to adapt the amount of data to be sent on the network with the network bandwidth available.
Confine the data to the subnetworks where it is actually used when the system is logically and physically partitioned.

Vortex OpenSplice DDS Network Scheduler and its Network priority Lanes

The DDS Network Scheduler allows you to have maximal nodal scalability. It can be configured to appear as the unique proxy of all the local applications on the network. The system scalability is, therefore, depending on the number of machines rather than being correlated to the number of DDS participant applications, as it is the case with the classical Single Process mode.

The Network Scheduler; creates as many network priority lanes as needed and helps you to enforce message priority even on non-priority-preserving transports, such as the TCP/IP or UDP/IP.

The DDS Global data space as well as the applications that produce them can be organized in logical groups known as DDS partitions. The Non-Vortex OpenSplice DDS implementations use the same multicast address to spread the data everywhere and rely on the DDSi protocol stack to discard the unwanted data on a given node.

DDS Logical to Physical Partitioning Mapping

For instance, if your system is organized in four geographical partitions, North, South, East, and West, and you are building an air surveillance-like system, each region needs to have a sub-system to detect intrusions and need to react locally and immediately.

When a Radar of given geographical region detects and publishes the position of a given track in the air, you don’t want that data to get spread over the entire network and waste you critical network bandwidth and resources and consume unnecessarily CPUs time when the subscribing application that is responding to the threat is in the same region as the publisher.

Vortex Opensplice Network Scheduler allows you to associate different multicast and unicast addresses to the same DDS logical partition to confine, physically, the traffic to the subnetwork where there is real interest in the produced data.

The federated architecture with shared memory results in an extremely low footprint, excellent scalability, and optimal performance when compared to other DDS implementations where each reader and writer are seen as a ‘communication-endpoints’ each one with their own storage.

Simple Standalone/Single Process Architecture

This deployment allows the DDS applications and Vortex OpenSplice middleware libraries to be simply linked together into a single process.

One of the advantages of this deployment option is that; there is no need to pre-configure a shared memory segment as dynamic heap memory is utilized by the process. Along with the 'zero-configuration', there is no need to start up the federation's services as all functionality is bundled within the application process. The middleware, the data and the application lifecycles are tied together.

This kind of simple deployment can suffice when you have one DDS aware application per machine and when there is nothing to federate. It can be particularly useful for embedded platforms.

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Vortex OpenSplice sets itself apart from other types of messaging or data sharing technology due to both its advanced features and the non-functional properties it brings to a system. These properties include:

Data Centric - enabling applications to be designed around an extensible and evolvable data model, promoting end-to-end type safety and time and space efficiency. In addition, data-centricity promotes time and space de-coupling leading to systems that are easier to integrate, evolve and reuse.
Real-time - the right information is delivered to the right place at the right time, all the time. Failure to deliver key information within the required deadlines can lead to life, mission or business threatening situations.
Dependable - ensuring availability, reliability, safety and integrity in spite of hardware and software failures.
Secure - provides the ability to maintain confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged data.

The Vortex Commercial edition adds with the following benefits:

Increased productivity through a powerful tool such as :
- the Tuner tool,
- the Tester tool,
- the Configurator
- the Record and Replay Manager tools.
- the Launcher,
- the shared memory monitor
Scalable Durability Service that supports disconnections, and automatic alignment policies to guarantee the Eventually consistent model of all the non-volatile data sets within the DDS domain.
Better performance, determinism and scalability, through the use of unique architectural patterns such as
- the network scheduling,
- the shared memory,
- the traffic shaping,
- the data partitioning, and
- the priority lanes patterns.
Extra communication paradigms such as
- the RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and
- the Stream APIs.
Extra Connectivity, enabling data to be shared and integrated across a wide spectrum of technologies, including:
- web technologies,
- databases and
- simulation and modulization environments.
A Complete Professional Service offering that includes:
- Consulting,
- Training,
- Technical support with different levels of committed Service Level Agreements.
Longevity support. Once your product is deployed with Vortex OpenSplice, you may wish to only support the given version in-use rather than the most up-to-date. In that case you can get support on a frozen product version and take only updates you really need.
Wide range of Enterprise and Embedded platform support including:
- Linux
- Windows
- VxWorks
- PikeOS, any many others on-demand

AdvancedTCA Switch Blade

aTCA-3430

3U CompactPCI Serial Blades

cPCI-A3525

6U CompactPCI 2.0 Blades

cPCI-6636(KL) Series

Embedded Flash Storage

2.5 inch SATA SSD Series

Machine Vision AI

Smart Pallet

COM-HPC Server Type

COM-HPC Ampere Altra

AdvancedTCA Switch Blade

aTCA-3430

ADLINK Edge SDK

Edge SDK

Medical Panel PCs

MLC-AL/ MLC-KL

Extreme Outdoor Servers

SETO-1000

COM Express Type 6

Express-RLP

Preliminary

Mini-ITX Motherboards

AmITX-SL-G

Edge Server

MECS-6110

Machine Condition Monitoring

MCM-204

Embedded MXM Modules

EGX-MXM-T1000

Embedded MXM Modules

EGX-MXM-T1000

Expandable Fanless Embedded PCs

MVP-6100

Motion Control

PCIe-8158

COM-HPC Server Type

COM-HPC Ampere Altra

Industrial Monitors

OM Series

Preliminary

Edge Server

MECS-6110

Deep Learning Inference Platforms

DLAP-301-JNX

Preliminary

Autonomous Mobile Robot

SMR250 series

Preliminary

Autonomous Mobile Robot

SMR250 series

Preliminary

Edge Server

PCIe-ACC100

NVIDIA Jetson Edge AI Platform

DLAP-211-JT2

Industrial Monitors

IM-215

Preliminary

COM-HPC Client Type

COM-HPC-cADP

Preliminary

Machine Vision

PCIe-U300 Series

Integrated Fanless Embedded PCs

MVP-5100-MXM

Embedded MXM Modules

EGX-MXM-RTX3000

VPX 3U Processor Blades

VPX3020

Data Acquisition (DAQ)

USB-2401

Network Security Appliance

CSA-7400

ATX Motherboards

IMB-M45

Preliminary

COM Express Type 7

Express-ID7