By Hans-Arno Jacobsen, Humboldt University, Berlin, Institute of Information Systems, jacobsen@wiwi.hu-berlin.de .
The High-Performance CORBA Working Group (HPC WG) started at the Salt Lake City OMG TC meeting, as a working group 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 : txt, PostScript, PDF.)
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 modeling 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:
The HPC WG is chaired by H.-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.
In: OMG in Motion, Spring 1999, by H.-Arno Jacobsen