Computational Network Federations (CNFs) enable an arbitrary set of heterogeneous hosts which are connected via any type of network to form dynamic virtual distributed systems that cooperate to execute an application, or serve as generalized application service platforms to end users. CNFs motivate a view of the Internet as a vast unified host: a repository of information, application services, and an omnipresent supercomputing resource regardless of the type of access device or access methodology. CNFs provide a powerful way of virtualizing generalized enterprise networks (or even the Internet), and an economic and resilient model for deploying enterprise applications, (such as CRM) and peer-2-peer services (e.g., chatrooms). This paper describes a middleware architecture that enables network-based computing, communications, and services through a unified, access, and platform-independent approach. CNFs borrow from the capabilities of grid computing and aim toward intelligent computational service networks that are ubiquitous, secure, and adaptive to user and access-method idiosyncrasies. CNFs encompass a set of abstractions and interfaces that provide: 1) a unified service-oriented view of the network to the user; 2) a homogeneous host abstraction to applications; and 3) a shared-memory abstraction to software developers. This paper outlines the architecture of CNFs and describes in more detail i-DVM, a distributed multithreaded meta-OS that forms the core of a CNF and implements the virtual machine abstraction and location transparency.

Abstract Distributed computing has become increasingly popular in the high‐performance community. Java's remote method invocation (RMI) provides a simple, yet powerful method for implementing parallel algorithms. The performance of RMI has been less than adequate, however, and object serialization is often identified as a major performance inhibitor. We believe that object serialization is best performed in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), where information regarding object layout and hardware communication resources are readily available. We implement a subset of Java's object serialization protocol in native code, using the Java Native Interface (JNI) and JVM internals. Experiments show that our approach is up to eight times faster than Java's original object serialization protocol for array objects. Also, for linked data structures our approach obtains a moderate speedup and better scalability. Evaluation of our object serialization implementation in an RMI framework indicates that a higher throughput can be obtained. Parallel applications, written using RMI, obtain better speedups and scalability when this more efficient object serialization is used. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Grid systems, such as Globus, Legion and Globe, provide an infrastructure for implementing metacomputing over the Internet. The Component Architecture Toolkit (CAT) provides a software layer above the grid that facilitates programming and end-user interaction with the grid.

Java RMI provides an elegant and powerful model for invoking member functions on objects that exist in remote address spaces. Unfortunately, it is a Java-to-Java communication model, and in many of the scientific applications we would like Java objects to interact with modules written in C++ or Fortran. This paper explores the design of RMI and extracts a subset of the RMI object model that is compatible with C++ and HPC++ remote object semantics. This RMI subset has been implemented to run over the Nexus runtime system and is being used as part of the LSA distributed linear system analyzer project. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.