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2 Introduction

The MST ray trace software suite is based upon a large number of individual programs which operate on a stream of photons. The programs are orchestrated into a production “pipeline” by passing the output of one program to the input of the next. This document describes the format of the data stream and a library of functions to access the data.

There are a few unique properties required of the data streams:

The bpipe data format and library provide this functionality. 1 The data stream is organized into a single header packet and multiple data packets, each of which has the same format. The header packet both describes the format of the data packets and contains annotation data. Both the header and the data packets are extensible; the user can add or delete data from either.

The bpipe library provides tools that allow the program to manipulate the data stream. It provides for addition and deletion of data, for splitting the data stream, and for extracting appropriate data from the stream. It insulates applications from the exact layout of the data, and filters out unnecessary information about the contents.


Footnotes

[1] bpipe is a contraction of “binary pipe”.