Distributed Computing in Life Science Research -Presenter: Yijian Yang

Motivation  Huge computational task in life science research  Heterogeneous, distributed computing environment

Problem Unix Linux Windows

CORBA  What is CORBA? Common Object Request Broker Architecture.

CORBA (cont.) It can be simply conceptualized as a communication bus for client-server object. Object Request Invoke function Run() on Z Z Run() IDL

CORBA (cont.)

How to develop CORBA applications 1. Define interface 2. Write the.idl file Module XXX{ interface YYY{ Method1(); Method2(); }; 3. Compile it with an idl compiler 4. Use the output to build the server and the client

Server.idl specification file Compilation A package of empty source code for server skeleton Implement the object Create and register the object to CORBA server Ready for client request

Client Start locator service Bind to CORBA server Invoke remote method

Example  European Bioinformatics Institute: corba.ebi.ac.uk For example: To get the access number of a sequence, the corresponding function: getEmblSeq EmblSeqEmblSeq getEmblSeq(in string bio_seq_id) raises(type::NoResult, Superceded);type::NoResultSuperceded

Example (cont.) In client program, if we want to use remote object Embl in EBI EMBL CORBA server, we should do: 1.org.omg.CORBA.ORB orb = org.omg.CORBA.ORB.init(); 2.Embl sample = EmblHelper.bind(orb, “Embl”) ; //bind to server orb 3.sample.start(); 4.sample.getEmblSeq(arg[0]);

Example (cont.)

Other Method  Microsoft’s DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model)  Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation)

Conclusion  CORBA is a promising technology for distributed object computing in life science research and has provided pointers to further information.

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