Distributed computing using channel communications and Java

Various methods of connecting CSP channels to external software systems are examined. The aim is to facilitate the implementation of distributed heterogeneous systems using channel communication. The paper concentrates on TCP/IP connec- tions in a Java environment. The approaches used are: custom protocol; object serial- ization stream protocol; Remote Method Invocation (RMI); Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Practical systems are described and compared. The rapid development of Web technologies is opening up a number of different possibilities for using the Internet in new ways. One aspect of these changes is the evolution from the information Web to a computing Web. Recent developments in networking and application software are facilitating the use of wide area networks in distributed computing. This will change the way in which some science and engineering is done, allowing researchers to access remotely not only libraries but also instruments and computational resources. With the development of high speed network technologies, high performance computing systems are evolving into heterogeneous networked resources. In order to permit wide take-up of remote, large-scale parallel computation, there need to be clearly visible benets and transparent user access. Users will demand interactive access to remote parallel applications. The software tools must be put in place to allow researchers to make use of remote systems using commonly available software and widely accepted means of working. An important class of computational resource consists of systems built using the princi- ples of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Among the advantages of such systems is that they can be relatively easily designed to be free of deadlocks, race hazards, etc. Soft- ware implementations include occam, and Java libraries such as CTJ and JCSP. The normal means by which such systems communicate is through channels. In this paper, we exam- ine methods of connecting such channels to external software systems. This would facilitate the implementation of distributed heterogeneous systems using CSP channels. The efcient implementation of such a development would, for example, allow a graphical application running on a PC to interact with a parallel computational program running on a remote com- puter.