Are there any libraries which put a reliability layer on top of UDP broadcast?
I need to broadcast large amounts of data to a large number of machines as quickly as possible, and generally it seems like such a problem must have already been solved many times over, but I wasn’t able to find anything except for the Spread toolkit, which has a somewhat viral license (you have to mention it in all materials advertising the end product, which I’m not sure our customer will be willing to do).
I was already going to write such a thing myself (because it would be extremely fun to do!) but decided to ask first.
I looked also at UDT (http://udt.sourceforge.net) but it does not seem to provide a broadcast operation.
PS I’m looking at something as lightweight as a library – no infrastructure changes.
How about UDP multicast? Have a look at the PGM protocol for which there are several commercial and open source implementations.
Disclaimer: I’m the author of OpenPGM, an open source implementation of said protocol.