Project Summary for Fiscal Year 1996

AO_NUMBER

D023

CONTRACTOR

Georgia Institute of Technology

SUBCONTRACTOR

IBM TJ Watson Research Laboratory

Principal Investigators

Karsten Schwan
College Of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
Phone: 404-894-2589
FAX: 404-894-9846
schwan@cc.gatech.edu

Mustaque Ahamad
College Of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
Phone: 404-894-2593
FAX: 404-894-9846
mustaq@cc.gatech.edu

Title:

Configurable Objects for High Performance Systems

Related Information

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/systems/projects/COBS

Objective

The COBS project is developing a uniform programming model for high performance, heterogeneous machines. The intent of our work is to have broad impact by leveraging commercial object technologies, while simultaneously attaining high performance by gaining and using novel research insights on efficient object representations.

Approach

The object model has been shown to be useful in developing very large scale applications, however existing commercial object implementations do not offer the performance necessary for use in demanding environments. The COBS project is addressing this problem by developing a configurable object support layer that allows object implementations to adapt to the both the demands of the application and the capabilities of the hardware. Particular attention is being paid to the need to support efficient distributed and fragmented object abstractions which can adapt to different network transport protocols with vastly different bandwidth, latency and availability characteristics.

Recent 1996 Accomplishments

• Development of the configurable Object Transport Layer (the core of the Object Request Broker, in CORBA terms).
• Development of configurable and high performance communication substrates for use by OTL.
• Development of mutual consistency abstraction for objects and their realization in a Fresco-based system.
• IDL-based object invocation interface and notion of configuration objects and attributes realized in this context.
• Design and partial implementation of CORBA COS event channels with IBM.

Fiscal Year 1997 Plan

• Integration of configurable communications into the Object Transport Layer.
• Experimental evaluation with high performance applications.
• Experimental evaluation with interactive applications, including remote high quality visualizations.
• Interaction with additional companies for technology transfer, including small business units like SYSTRAN Corp.

Technology Transition

Joint work with IBM on a CORBA object services event channel implementation known as the Event Reaction Architecture may be incorporated into IBM's commercial distributed object system. IBM's efforts may lead to its incorporation into emerging industry-wide standards for inter-ORB interaction.