CrispORB: high performance CORBA for system area network

CrispORB is a high performance CORBA that enables low-latency request delivery among cluster nodes connected with the system area network (SAN) and provides a communication infrastructure for large-scale and high-volume cluster system construction with distributed object-oriented components. Compared with standard IIOP ORBs, CrispORB is be able to reduce the protocol overhead using a system area network with intelligent functions for efficient data transfer. CrispORB preserves language mapping specified by COBRA/OMG standards so that component programs written for conventional CORBA could be used without rewriting. CrispORB can manage both SAN and TCP/IP simultaneously, which means the cluster node can communicate with clients via the Internet and with other nodes on the cluster using SAN. Components need not be aware of lower connections because CrispORB selects the transport between SAN and TCP/IP automatically. We selected the VI Architecture to use SAN's communication functions, which are proposed as an industrial standard API for SAN. CrispORB will be portable onto various types of SANs. We have integrated VIA buffer management and CDR (Common Data Representation) format processing to reduce data movement cost. CrispORB was developed based on INTERSTAGE/ObjectDirector (Fujitsu'S CORBA product) and Synfinity-O (Fujitsu's SAN).