Abstract

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high-performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem-solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high-performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier–Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high-performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user's desktop computing environment can be extended to a high-performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer.

Author Keywords: Problem-solving environments; High-performance legacy codes; CORBA components; Wrapper generator; Parallel and distributed computing

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. The software architecture of the PSE

3. Engineering high-performance legacy codes as CORBA components

3.1. The strategies to leverage legacy codes to a distributed PSE

3.2. A CORBA compliant component model

3.3. A CORBA oriented wrapper generator

4. Case study 1: a molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) application

4.1. The MDS legacy code

4.2. Performance comparisons

5. Case study 2: a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application

6. Related work

7. Conclusions and future work

References