NPAC Technical Report SCCS-807
Parallel and Distributed Computing using Pervasive Web and
Object Technologies
Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski
Submitted February 4, 1998
Abstract
We review the growing power and capability of commodity
computing and communication technologies largely driven by commercial
distributed information systems. These systems are built from CORBA,
Microsoft's COM, Javabeans, and less sophisticated web and networked
approaches. One can abstract these to a three-tier model with largely
independent clients connected to a distributed network of servers. The
latter host various services including object and relational databases
and, of course, parallel and sequential computing. High performance can
be obtained by combining concurrency at the middle-server tier with
optimized parallel back-end services. The resultant system combines the
needed performance for large-scale HPCC applications with the rich
functionality of commodity systems. Further, the architecture with
distinct interface, server and specialized service implementation
layers, naturally allows advances in each area to be easily
incorporated. We show that this approach can be applied to both
metacomputing and to provide improved parallel programming
environments. We describe exploitation issues within a CORBA context
and illustrate how performance can be obtained within a commodity
architecture. Examples are given from collaborative systems, support of
multidisciplinary interactions, proposed visual HPCC ComponentWare,
distributed simulation, and the use of Java in high-performance
computing.