Requirements for and Evaluation of RMI Protocols for Scientific Computing

Distributed software component architectures provide a promising approach to the problem of building large scale, scientific Grid applications 18. Communication in these component architectures is based on Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocols that allow one software component to invoke the functionality of another. Examples include Java remote method invocation (Java RMI)25 and the new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 15. SOAP has the advantage that many programming languages and component frameworks can support it. This paper describes experiments showing that SOAP by itself is not efficient enough for large scale scientific applications. However, when it is embedded in a multi-protocol RMI framework, SOAP can be effectively used as a universal control protocol, that can be swapped out by faster, more special purpose protocols when large data transfer speeds are needed.