A client/server approach for HPC applications within a networking environment

Abstract

This paper describes a client/server approach for high-performance computing applications using the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specification from the OMG (Object Management Group). This approach is based on the Cobra runtime system which has been targeted to exploit the computing power of a network of homogeneous workstations. It exploits a new high-performance networking technology such as SCI From the user's point of view, a network of workstations can be seen as a parallel computing resource. The Cobra runtime system is a resource manager which allows users to allocate processors and memory for the execution of applications using a client/server approach. Cobra is a set of CORBA services that can be called from any machine in the network. To illustrate such approach, we present a signal processing application from Aerospatiale that takes benefit of the Cobra runtime system.