Migrating legacy codes to distributed computing environments: a CORBA approach

摘要

This paper describes techniques used to migrate legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment (PSE). It presents a CORBA compliant wrapper generator (WG), which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes in C or Fortran as CORBA components for reuse in the PSE. Using WG, a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) legacy code has been wrapped as a CORBA component and a PSE for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows has been implemented. A user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user's desktop computing environment can be extended to a computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer.