BXSA for fast processing of scientific data

XML has become the de facto standard for semi-structured data across a variety of domains. XML is generally considered to be slow for scientific data and therefore only used for control information. This approach puts a burden on software developers as they have to be familiar with two type systems; one for control and the other for data. Also, this approach prevents scientific data from being "first class members" in XML, especially in a web services framework. A type system, such as binary XML targeted towards scientific data will be flexible enough to represent the control information and would efficiently encode such scientific data. In order to get wide acceptance for such a format, it should be beneficial to real-life scientific applications and also should be usable across many different applications and programming languages. In this paper we extend our previous work on Binary XML for Scientific Applications (BXSA) by (1) applying BXSA to the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code fusion application, and showing that performance is better than HDF5 in our test cases; (2) demonstrating an interoperable Java implementation that is faster than Xerces and Sun's Fast Infoset on common document types; and (3) showing that BXSA is also applicable to business data in addition to scientific data by evaluating its performance on a variety of XML documents against libxml2 and expat. These results show that BXSA is applicable for many scenarios.