A Data Broker for Distributed Computing Environments

This paper presents a toolkit for managing distributed communication in multi-application systems that are targeted to run in high performance computing environments; the Distributed Data Broker (DDB). The DDB provides a flexible mechanism for coupling codes with different grid resolutions and data representations. The target applications are coupled systems that deal with large volumes of data exchanges and/or are computational expensive. These application codes need to run efficiently in massively parallel computer environments generating a need for a distributed coupling to minimize long synchronization points. Furthermore, with the DDB, coupling is realized in a plug-in manner rather than hard-wire inclusion of any programming language statements. The DDB performance in the CRAY T3E- 600 and T3E-900 systems is examined.