The FMDB is implemented with C++ and provides a C/C++ API (Application Programming Interface) and an inter-language operable (ITAPS) Mesh API. Several advanced C++ programming elements such as the STL (Standard Template Library), functors, templates, singletons, and generic programming are used for the purpose of achieving reusability of the software. For efficient parallel communications between processors, MPI (Message Passing Interface) and the Autopack are used. The Zoltan library is used for initial mesh partitioning and dynamic mesh load balancing of distributed meshes.

The license for the FMDB is an open source license. Management of the FMDB software is done using GForge with the project web page here. The latest version of FMDB is in the SCM tab of the FMDB GForge project and is accessed using Subversion (note that as this is the current version it is not guaranteed to be stable). It is strongly encouraged that users retrieve the releases directly from the Subversion repository. The most recent stable release is revision 2272 and was released on November 14, 2007. All stable releases of the FMDB that have been verified to be stable for a limited set of tests are also available.