MPC: a new message passing library in CORBA

The need for interoperability among the rapidly proliferating amount of hardware and software led to the definition of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), which standardizes the execution support of distributed object applications. This architecture offers a good interoperability and encapsulation support. In addition, the method invocation mechanism offers several features and can be used as a good communication model. Consequently, the use of such architecture for distributed metacomputing applications seems interesting and promising. However, its implementation is difficult because of protocol diversity and communication modes used by parallel applications. Moreover, this diversity of protocols is added to the intrinsic difficulty of the use of the object design approach and basic mechanisms of CORBA components. To cure this problem, we develop a message passing library in the CORBA environment called MPC (Message Passing in CORBA). We quickly present the basic concepts of this library and the point-to-point communication protocol used.