ObjectMap: Integrating high performance resources into a distributed object-oriented environment
Mike Sharrott, Stuart Hungerford, John Lilleyman · 1995
As modern computing environments mature towards a distributed object-oriented architecture, the ability to effectively integrate a high performance computation resource into the environment becomes more difficult This is due to the restricted operating system that such resources typically provide with respect to object-oriented programming techniques and distributed access. For similar reasons, the capability of the resource to access modern, persistent object-oriented databases is also limited. This paper describes the ObjectMap software framework which is currently being developed to address these problems and to more efficiently integrate computation resources into main stream computing. The work focuses on data handling between persistent databases and computation resources across a network. ObjectMap has adopted the emerging Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard from the Object Management Group (OMG) for its base architecture with the implementation being realised using the Orbix product from Iona Technologies. The paper describes the benefits obtained through using the CORBA and also the limitations that it has introduced. The research is being performed by the CSIRO Division of Information Technology as a project within the Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Advanced Computational Systems (ACSys) in collaboration with the Australian National University’s department of Computer Science. It is also being sponsored by Digital Equipment Corporation (Australia) Pty. Ltd.