On the Performance of Remote Method Invocation for Large Scale Scientiic Applications

Distributed software component architectures provide a promising approach to the problem of building large scale, scientiic Grid applications 8]. Communication in these component architectures is based on Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocols that allow one software component to invoke the functionality of another. Examples include Java remote method invocation (Java-RMI))3] and the new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 6]. SOAP has the advantage of being supportable by many programming languages and component frameworks. This paper describes experiments showing that SOAP by itself is not eecient enough for large scale scientiic applications. However, when it is embedded in a multi-protocol RMI framework, SOAP can be eeectively used as a universal control protocol, that can be swapped out by faster, more special purpose protocols when large data transfer speeds are needed.