Frequently Asked Questions
What is FastDL?
What do I need to use FastDL?
What version of IDL do I need?
What is the relationship between Tech-X Corporation and ITT Visual Information Solutions?
Is commercial licensing available?
Is non-commercial licensing available?
Where should I send my questions related to FastDL?
When I try to run the mpiDL or TaskDL test example files, I get the error message
"Unable to connect to X Windows display".
What is FastDL?
FastDL is a suite of add-on libraries and tools for IDL from ITT Visual Information Solutions that provides task scheduling and message passing for parallel computing. FastDL consists of two components: mpiDL for message passing parallelism and TaskDL for task scheduling.
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What do I need to use FastDL?
First, you need one or more machines connected in a common network -- this could be a Linux cluster, workstations in a LAN, or other network setup. FastDL requires a cluster with each node licensed for IDL. mpiDL requires an up-to-date installation of mpich while TaskDL needs ssh access to the cluster nodes and a common file system across the cluster (nfs).
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What version of IDL do I need?
FastDL has been built and tested with both IDL 6.4 and 7.0.
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What is the relationship between Tech-X Corporation and ITT Visual Information Solutions?
Tech-X Corporation and ITT Visual Information Soultions have worked together on a number of technology development projects.
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Is commercial licensing available?
Yes. Contact sales@txcorp.com with inquiries.
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Is non-commercial licensing available?
No, only commercial licensing is available for FastDL.
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Where should I send my questions related to FastDL?
Support for FastDL is provided by Tech-X. You can contact our support staff by emailing support@txcorp.com. You may also address technical questions via email to the FastDL discussion
list. Sales questions should be directed to sales@txcorp.com.
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When I try to run the mpiDL or TaskDL test example files, I get the error message
"Unable to connect to X Windows display".
IDL system errors, such as license manager errors, try to open a message
window using X, which can cause this error. If you get this message, there
may be an issue with the IDL licenses on the cluster. You can check your IDL
license manager through the program 'lmstat' included in your IDL
distribution. You can also log on to the worker machines and run 'idl -rt' to
confirm that runtime licenses are available. Runtime or interactive licenses
are needed by all nodes being used by mpiDL.
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