Are CORBA services ready to support resource management middleware for heterogeneous computing?

The goal of this paper is to report our findings as to which CORBA services are ready to support distributed system software in a heterogeneous environment. In particular, we implemented intercommunication between components in our Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) using four different CORBA mechanisms: the Static Invocation Interface (SII), the Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII), Untyped Event Services, and Typed Event Services. MSHN's goals are to manage dynamically changing sets of heterogeneous adaptive applications in a heterogeneous environment. We found these mechanisms at various stages of maturity, resulting in some being less useful than others. In addition, we found that the overhead added by CORBA varied from a low of 10.6 milliseconds per service request to a high of 279.1 milliseconds per service request on workstations connected via 100 Mbits/sec Ethernet. We therefore conclude that using CORBA not only substantially decreases the amount of time required to implement distributed system software, but it need not degrade performance.

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