The ``Agenda'' of the High-Performance CORBA Working Group
In: OMG Newsletter March, 1999.
The High-Performance CORBA Working Group (HPC WG) started at the Salt
Lake City OMG TC meeting, as a working goup within the Real Time CORBA
PSIG, early in 1998. Since then it has held various symposia on issues
of high performance computing and CORBA, bringing together ORB vendors
and high performance computing specialists. Recently the group has
issued its first RFI on ``Supporting Aggregated Computing in
CORBA''(OMG Document:orbos/99-01-04 ).
The HPC WG aims at issues relevant to applications with stringent
performance requirements, such as scalable web servers, image render
farms (i.e., computer animated movie production, or teleimmersion),
radar processing stations, large physical system modelling tools, and
digital signal processing. It is thus complementing groups that stress
issues such as determinism, predictability, and reliability (Real Time
CORBA PSIG), small memory footprint (Embedded Systems WG), and
instrumentation (Benchmarking PSIG) for CORBA compliant software
systems.
The mission of the HPC WG is to identify areas of possible
standardization activities to support those CORBA applications which
are willing to specify more detailed control or hints to achieve
higher performance than that which is possible or expected by internal
ORB optimization alone. This may include standardization of
interfaces to proxies (a.k.a. ``smart proxies''), multi--threading,
means to express co-location, support for pluggable functional
modules, and exposing data structures.
Furthermore, High-Performance CORBA aims at supporting applications
that explicitly perform aggregated processing by using multiple
processors to accelerate a single computing task. Signal processing is
an important domain of such applications, e.g., collective operations,
distributed synchronization, resource grouping, and data distribution.
The main challenge of the High-Performance CORBA Working Group is to
guide the standardization process resulting in CORBA-compliant
systems for the aggregated computing technology market (e.g.,
computing clusters, networks of workstations, distributed computing
systems).
The following constitutes a partial list of issues that are currently
being discussed by the working group:
- Mappings for high performance transports,
- integration of Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) in CORBA framework,
- pluggable functional modules,
- support for multi-threading,
- investigation of grouping (data, processor, communication) concepts,
- support for load balancing,
- support for parallel processing.
The HPC WG is chaired by Arno Jacobsen from Humboldt University,
Berlin and Jim Kulp from Mercury Inc. The group may be reached through
its web page at
http://www.omg.org/realtime/working_groups/ high_performance_corba.html
and distributes announcements on its
mailing list rthp@omg.org. Send email to request@omg.org to be added
to this mailing list.
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