Remote Data Access in Distributed Object-Oriented Middleware

Efficient, scalable remote access to data is a key aspect in wide area metacomputing environments. One of the limitations of current client-server computing models is their inability to create, retain and trade tokens which represent data or services on remote computers alongwith the metadata to adequately describe the data or services. Most current client-server software systems require the user to submit all the data inputs that are needed for a remote operation, and after the operation is complete, all the resultant output data is returned to the originating client. Pipelining remote processes requires data be retained at the remote site for achieving performance on high latency wide area networks. We introduce the DISCWorld Remote Access Mechanism (DRAM), an integral component of our DISCWorld metacomputing environment, which provides the user and system with a scalable abstraction over remote data and the operations that are possible on the data. We present a formal notation for DRAM’s and discuss the implementation and performance of DRAM’s when compared with traditional client-server systems.