Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem solving environments: A web service approach

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user’s desktop computing environment can be extended to a high performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer

A CORBA-Based Object Group Service and a Join Service Providing a Transparent Solution for Parallel Programming

The field of distributed parallel programming is predominated by tools such as the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and the Message Passing Interface (MPI). On the other hand, mainly standards like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Remote Method Invocation (RMI), and the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) are used for distributed computing. In this paper, we examine the suitability of CORBA-based solutions for meeting application requirements in the field of parallel programming. We outline concepts defined within CORBA which are helpful for the development of parallel applications. Subsequently, we present our design of an Object Group Service and a Join Service which facilitate the development of CORBA-based distributed and parallel software applications by transparently encapsulating typical forking and joining mechanisms often needed in that context