Adaptive Utilization of Communication and Computational Resources in High-Performance Distribution Systems: The EMOP Approach

Development of high-performance distributed applications can be extremely challenging because of their complex runtime environment coupled with their requirement of high-performance. Such applications typically run on a set of heterogeneous machines with dynamically varying loads, connected by heterogeneous networks possibly supporting a wide variety of communication protocols. In spite of the size and complexity of such applications, they must provide the required high-performance mandated by their users. In order to achieve this goal, they need to adaptively utilize their computational and communication resources. This paper describes EMOP, a programming environment for building high-performance distributed systems. EMOP is designed on the lines of CORBA and uses an Object Request Broker (ORB) to support seamless communication between distributed application components. In order to provide adaptive utilization of communication resources, it uses the principle of Open Implementation to open up the communication mechanisms of its ORB. By virtue of its open architecture, the ORB supports multiple, possibly custom, communication protocols, along with automatic and user controlled protocol selection at run-time. In order to support adaptive utilization of computational resources, EMOP also provides a flexible and powerful set of load-balancing mechanisms that can be used to implement custom load-balancing strategies. This paper describes EMOP’s Open ORB architecture and load balancing mechanisms, and uses a set of simple experiments to demonstrate 1Copyright 1998 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of HPDC-7’98, 28-31 July 1998 at Chicago, Illinois. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Contact: Manager, Copyrights and Permissions / IEEE Service Center / 445 Hoes Lane / P.O. Box 1331 / Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, USA. Telephone: + Intl. 732-562-3966. their usefulness.