Managing Data-Types: The CORBA Approach and AutoMap/AutoLink, an MPI Solution

There are many ways to create a distributed system, such as with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), PARMACS, p4, Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). This article concentrates on MPI, CORBA and the Interface for information (data-type) transfer. We discuss the transfer of complex data-types, that are compositions of basic predefined data-types, which are data-types that link to other basic, complex or dynamic data-types (i.e. contani pointers). This article will present CORBA, MPI, their default way of handling such data-types, and our MPI solutions : AutoMap and AutoLink.