The NDFS-II has few dependencies in order to ease the portability. The two main dependencies are the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) and Qt from Trolltech.

The ACE framework implements many useful core patterns such as shared memory management, event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, service initialization, or explicit dynamic linking that function across a variety of operating system. Moreover ACE was designed to support applications having quality of service requirements, including high performance for bandwidth-intensive and real-time applications. All these reasons oriented our choice to use ACE to implement the core of NDFS-II.

ACE can be downloaded here: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html

Qt4 provides a high level API and a set of tools to design GUI. So we chose it to implement all GUI used to perform control over the NDSF-II network. Qt4 can be downloaded here: http://www.trolltech.com/

If you intend to deploy the system on a cluster of computers, you most likely won't need any graphical user interface on some of the machine. Qt is not needed in that case.