Input/output plugin architecture for MDSplus

The first version of MDSplus was released in 1991 for VAX/VMS. Since that time the underlying file formats have remained constant. The software however has evolved, it was ported to unix, linux, Windows, and Macintosh. In 1997 a TCP based protocol, mdsip, was added to provide network access to MDSplus data. In 2011 a mechanism was added to allow protocol plugins to permit the use of other transport mechanisms such as ssh to access data users. This paper describes a similar design which permits the insertion of plugins to handle the reading and writing of MDSplus data at the data storage level. Tree paths become URIs which specify the protocol, host, and protocol specific information. The protocol is provided by a dynamically activated shared library that can provide any consistent subset of the data store access API, treeshr. The existing low level network protocol called mdsip, is activated by defining tree paths like "host::/directory". Using the new plugin mechanism this is re-implemented as an instance of the general plugin that replaces the low level treeshr input/output routines. It is specified by using a path like "mdsip://host/directory". This architecture will make it possible to adapt the MDSplus data organization and analysis tools to other underlying data storage. The first new application of this, after the existing network protocol is implemented, will be a plugin based on a key value store. Key value stores, can provide inexpensive scalable, redundant data storage. An example of this might be an Amazon G3 plugin which would let you specify a tree path such as "AG3://container" to access MDSplus data stored in the cloud.