Corba As Needed

Since CORBA is a modern computing technology that allows software developers to construct parallel and distributed software that can operate in a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment, it is quite natural to construct highly available and dependable distributed applications using CORBA. However, one significant problem encountered in designing and implementing highly available and dependable distributed applications using CORBA is poor performance. The main goal of this project is to experiment with a technique called corba as needed technique to improve the performance of applications constructed using CORBA. The two most important functionalities provided by CORBA are heterogeneity and location transparency. Heterogeneity allows different components of a distributed application to interoperate with one another despite the differences in the hardware and/or platforms that they run on. Location transparency allows a client to connect to a server and get appropriate service without knowing where the server is located in the network. The main motivation of this project is that while the ability to operate in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment is an important requirement for modern applications, a majority of the applications do in fact use the same operating system with compatible hardware platforms. For example, a quick survey of the major servers providing services over the Internet shows that a significant majority of them use Windows operating system. The key idea we have experimented with in this project is to allow applications to use CORBA functionalities when they are really needed, and transparently bypass them by using the standard TCP/UDP for communication when they are not needed. In other words, heterogeneity property of CORBA is used only when it is really needed.

Publications

H. Dai, S. Mishra, and M. Hiltunen. CORBA-as-Needed: A Technique to Construct High Performance CORBA Applications. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2002), Banglore, India (December 2002).
S. Mishra and N. Shi. Improving the Performance of Distributed CORBA Applications. In the Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2002), Fort Lauderdale, FL (April 2002).