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

Development of an online collaborative working environment for design and manufacturing

This research is to develop a novel collaborative working environment (CWE) for manufacturing and design using advanced Web/Internet technologies such as Web Service, Grid Service and other related software tools/packages. To achieve the above, the following research modules are developed by the author: A service oriented framework for computer aid design, which acts as an online collaboration system, has been developed with the utilisation of the latest technology, Web Service. The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has been implemented in the framework. Users from anywhere in the world can join the design process from their PCs, no matter what operation system they are using. The service-oriented system has the capability of going through firewalls and can afford multi-users due to the characteristics of Web service. Also the loose-coupling structure makes the system very easy to be updated. Another module for the CWE is to solve the software sharing problem when the platform is used among several geographically dispersed users or organisations. A software package bank system has been developed, which utilised the ideology of service oriented approach and successfully solved traditional problems in this field. Based on the outcomes mentioned above, the research finally developed a more powerful infrastructure using Grid service, which is a further development of Grid computing and Web service. The Grid service is considered to be the most important future solvent for Internet

Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)

Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on "wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue" approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking, automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Visual programming environments for multi-disciplinary distributed applications

A Problem Solving Environment is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling and running applications in a specific problem area or domain. A Visual Programming Environment is one possible front end to a problem solving environment. It applies the visual programming paradigms of "point and click" and "drag and drop", via a Graphical User Interface, to the various constituent components that are used to assemble an application. The aim of the problem solving environment presented here is to provide the ability to build up scientific applications by connecting, or plugging, software components together and to provide an intuitive way to construct scientific applications. Problem solving environments promise a totally new user environment for computational scientists and engineers. In this new paradigm, individual programs combined to solve a problem in their given area of expertise, are wrapped as components within an integrated system that is both powerful and easy to use. This thesis aims to address: problems in code reuse the combination of different codes in new ways and problems with underlying system familiarity and distribution. This is achieved by abstracting application composition using visual programming techniques. The work here focuses on a prototype environment using a number of demonstration problems from multi-disciplinary problem domains to illustrate some of the main difficulties in building problem solving environments and some possible solutions. A novel approach to code wrapping, component definition and application specification is shown, together with timing and usage comparisons that illustrate that this approach can be used successfully to help scientists and engineers in their daily work.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

JAVA Wrappers for Automated Interoperability

Databases in Networked Information Systems International Workshop DNIS 2000This paper concentrates on the issues related to implementation of interoperability between distributed subsystems, particularly in the context of reengineering and integration of several centralized legacy systems. Currently, most interoperability techniques require the data or services to be tightly coupled to a particular server. Furthermore, as most programmers are trained in designing stand- alone application, developing distributed system proves to be time-consuming and difficult. Here, we addressed those concerns by creating an interface wrapper model that allows developers to treat distributed objects as local objects. A tool that automatically generates the features of Java interface wrapper from a specification language called the Prototyping System Description Language has been developed based on the model.U.S. Army Research OfficeARO 40473.30-MA-S

Visual programming environments for multi-disciplinary distributed applications

A Problem Solving Environment is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling and running applications in a specific problem area or domain. A Visual Programming Environment is one possible front end to a problem solving environment. It applies the visual programming paradigms of "point and click" and "drag and drop", via a Graphical User Interface, to the various constituent components that are used to assemble an application. The aim of the problem solving environment presented here is to provide the ability to build up scientific applications by connecting, or plugging, software components together and to provide an intuitive way to construct scientific applications. Problem solving environments promise a totally new user environment for computational scientists and engineers. In this new paradigm, individual programs combined to solve a problem in their given area of expertise, are wrapped as components within an integrated system that is both powerful and easy to use. This thesis aims to address: problems in code reuse the combination of different codes in new ways and problems with underlying system familiarity and distribution. This is achieved by abstracting application composition using visual programming techniques. The work here focuses on a prototype environment using a number of demonstration problems from multi-disciplinary problem domains to illustrate some of the main difficulties in building problem solving environments and some possible solutions. A novel approach to code wrapping, component definition and application specification is shown, together with timing and usage comparisons that illustrate that this approach can be used successfully to help scientists and engineers in their daily work