Optimizing the CORBA Component Model for High-performance and Real-time Applications

With the recent adoption of the CORBA component model (CCM), application programmers now have a standard way to implement, manage, configure, and deploy components that implement and integrate CORBA services. The CCM standard not only enables greater software reuse for servers, it also provides greater flexibility for dynamic configuration of CORBA applications. Thus, CCM appears to be well-suited for general-purpose client/server applications. Due to the complexity of the standard and relative immaturity of implementations, however, CCM is not yet appropriate for mission-critical applications with high-performance and real-time quality of service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, we have begun a project to identify, prototype, benchmark, optimize, and deploy the key patterns and framework components necessary to mature the CCM standard so it can be applied successfully to mission-critical applications with stringent QoS requirements. In particular, we believe that the CCM provides an effective model for configuring various QoS aspects, such as transport protocols, memory and bandwidth management, concurrency, dependability, and security, into standard reusable components and adaptively controlling them. There are two contributions of our research project. First, we are identifying the performance bottlenecks and other obstacles that impede the use of CCM for high-performance and real-time applications. Second, we are demonstrating the effectiveness of our methodology of applying optimization principle patterns to alleviate these obstacles.