23 February 1998

This is the first NASD contributed software release. It is meant to be used in 
concert with the NASD 1.0 release, and will become a larger repository for software 
that is not a part of NASD per se, but which the NASD community will find interesting.

The only piece of software currently in the contrib repository is the Scaleable I/O 
library (siolib) and associated command-line programs. Documentation on it can be 
found via siolib/doc/index.html. siolib implements the API developed by the Scaleable 
I/O initiative, documented at http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/SIO/SioAPI.html 
(downloadable PostScript available).

The PDL implementation of the SIO API uses the Cheops manager, distributed with 
NASD 1.0, but does not depend on any underlying network file system. The locations 
of storage objects are instead encoded in normal Unix symbolic links, which routines 
in siolib can interpret. Two command-line utilities, sread and swrite, are included, 
which can be used to demonstrate scaleable I/O over multiple NASD drives.