The Nile project [14] is developing a CORBA-based distributed-computing solution for the CLEO high-energy physics experiment using a self-managing, fault-tolerant, heterogeneous system of hundreds of commodity workstations, with access to a distributed database in excess of about 100 terabytes. These resources are spread across the United States and Canada at 24 collaborating institutions.
TAO [16] is a high-performance ORB being developed by Douglas Schmidt of Washington University. Schmidt conducts research on high-performance implementations of CORBA [15], geared toward real-time image processing and telemedicine applications on workstation clusters over ATM. TAO, which is based on an optimized version of public domain IIOP implementation from SunSoft, outperforms commercial ORBs by a factor of 2 to 3.
The OASIS (Open Architecture Scientific Information System) [18] environment, being developed by Richard Muntz of UCLA for scientific data analysis, allows one to store, retrieve, analyze, and interpret selected datasets from a large collection of scientific information scattered across heterogeneous computational environments of earth science projects such as EOSDIS. Muntz is exploring the use of CORBA for building large-scale object-based data-mining systems. Several groups are also exploring specialized facilities for CORBA-based distributed computing. Examples include the Workflow Management Coalition [20] and Distributed Simulations [21].