Lessons Learned from Using CORBA for Components in Scientific Computing

The use of component architectures to solve the problem of reuse and interoperability in scientific computing has been investigated by various research groups during the last years. Moreover, architectures for Internet accessible mathematical services have been proposed. In this paper we give a brief abstract requirements analysis with respect to these problems and show that there is an existing technology that solves most of the requirements. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) provides a component framework that can be used for Internet accessible mathematical services and also for the efficient reuse of medium grained size functionality. We give some examples on the use of CORBA with respect to both applications. We provide measurement data which show that components of a granularity of less than {100} ms can be reused with an acceptibly small overhead.