A Parallel CORBA Component Model for Numerical Code Coupling

The fast growth of high bandwidth wide area networks has allowed the building of computational grids, which are constituted of PC clusters and/or parallel machines. Computational grids enable the design of new numerical simulation applications. For example, it is now feasible to couple several scientific codes to obtain a multi-physic application. In order to handle the complexity of such applications, software component technology appears very appealing. However, most current software component models provide no support to transparently and efficiently embed parallel codes into components. This paper describes a first study of GridCCM, an extension to the CORBA Component Model to support parallel components. The feasibility of the model is evaluated thanks to its implementation on top of two CCM prototypes. Preliminary performance results show that bandwidth is efficiently aggregated.