Cooperative Computing Tools

The Cooperative Computing Tools (cctools) are a collection of software that help users to share resources and get along with each other in a complex, heterogeneous, unreliable computing environment. The cctools provide reliable, operating-system-like services without requiring kernel changes or special privileges. Our goal is to create software gems: small pieces of novel software that do one thing well and have been hardened through daily use.

Please read the manuals for basic instructions and the HOWTO manuals for more complex tasks. Please report bugs by posting to our mailing list.

The major pieces of the cctools are:

Chirp - A personal filesystem and I/O protocol that allows unprivileged users to share space securely, efficiently, and conveniently. When combined with Parrot, Chirp allows users to create custom wide-area distributed filesystems. (learn more)

Parrot - A transparent user-level virtual filesystem that allows any ordinary program to be attached to a remote storage device such as an FTP server or a Chirp server. Parrot permits the user to add operating-system-like features to ordinary applications. (learn more)

The Fault Tolerant Shell - A novel high-level programming language that allows users to combine the ease of shell scripting, the power of distributed programming, and the precision of compiled languages. Think of this as parallel programming and exception handling for scripts. (learn more)

Some additional pieces of software written by members of the CCL include:

Sub-Identity Toolkit - A set of setuid binaries and a Pluggable Authentication Module that provides normal users with the ability to create security domains in the form of sub-users. (learn more)

AllocFS - A kernel-level filesystem that provides space-allocation features designed to make data intensive distributed computing systems more robust. (learn more)