Migrating legacy scientific applications towards CORBA-based client-server architectures
A distributed object is a reusable, self-contained piece of software that cooperates with other objects on the same machine or across a network in a plug-and-play fashion via a well-defined interface. The Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) attempts to provide a collaborative aircraft engine design and simulation environment based on this concept. Many scientific applications in aerodynamics and solid mechanics are written in Fortran. Refitting this legacy Fortran code with distributed objects can increase code reusability. In this paper, we focus on the novel use of a remote variable scheme to help programmers migrate the Fortran code towards a client-server architecture. This scheme gives the client the capability of accessing variables at the server site and makes it easier for programmers to couple component engine code. Through the operator overloading features in C++, remote variables can be used in much the same way as traditional variables. The remote variable scheme adopts the lazy update approach and the prefetch method. Preliminary performance evaluation shows that communication overhead can be greatly reduced. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
distributed object client-server computing code wrapping corba software reusability