PARDIS: A parallel approach to CORBA

Abstract

This paper describes PARDIS, a system containing explicit support for interoperability of PARallel DIStributed applications. PARDIS is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Like CORBA, it provides interoperability between heterogeneous components by specifying their interfaces in a meta-language, the CORBA IDL, which call be translated into the language of interacting components. However, PARDIS extends the CORBA object model by introducing SPMD objects representing data-parallel computations. SPMD objects allow the request broker to interact directly with the distributed resources of a parallel application. This capability ensures request delivery to all the computing threads of a parallel application and allows the request broker to transfer distributed arguments directly between the computing threads of the client and the server. To support this kind of argument transfer, PARDIS defines a distributed argument type-distributed sequence-a generalization of CORBA sequence representing distributed data structures of parallel applications. In this paper we will give a brief description of basic component interaction in PARDIS and give an account of the rationale and support for SPMD objects and distributed sequences. We will then describe two ways of implementing argument transfer in invocations on SPMD objects and evaluate and compare their performance.