Clean-CORBA Interface for Parallel Functional Programming on Clusters

The presented Clean-CORBA interface opens the way for developing parallel and distributed applications consisting of components written in a functional programming language, Clean. The interface defines a language mapping from the IDL language used by CORBA to Clean. It contains an IDL-to-Clean compiler which generates the necessary stub and skeleton routines from the IDL files. The interface is a general tool for connecting functional Clean programs and programs written in any language using a CORBA interface via the network. We focus on a specific application of this tool in this paper, we build a software architecture for programming clusters using the functional programming language Clean. We design and implement an abstract communication layer based on CORBA server objects. Using this architecture we can build up applications consisting components written in several programming languages, some components written in pure functional style in Clean, while other components written in an objectoriented language like Java or C#. Based on this software architecture the field of skeletal programming is studied, which suits very well with the functional programming. A skeleton for pipeline computing is chosen as an example to present the main features of this approach.