Component-Based Distributed Computing for Numerical Simulation
Abstract. This paper describes the use of a component-based distributed computing, DCOM, for a numerical simulation problem. Component-based distributed computing, such as CORBA, DCOM, and Java RMI, by distributing objects to be executed by networked computers, network of workstations, or PC clusters, has potential for use in large scale scientific simulation problems. DCOM developed by Microsoft is used here to exploit large installation base of networked Windows computers, such as PC labs in our campus, which is used in our experiments. A numerical heat transfer problem is used to illustrate the development of a DCOM application. The application dynamically partitions (and distributes) the problem into a number of components based on the number of available networked computers. Our tests show that large overhead in communications between the components and between the networked computers making such a distributed computing system sometimes performs slower than a simple computer.
Keywords: Distributed Computing, Network of Workstations, DCOM, Remote Method Invocation, Component-based Computing, and Numerical Simulation
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