An architecture for Web-enabled engineering applications based on lightweight high performance CORBA

Many scientific and engineering computer applications are computationally intensive. These applications are generally hosted on powerful servers, often multi-processor or cluster configurations. Engineers typically login to these servers and launch these applications through shell commands or scripts. When multiple engineering applications need to run in a design experiment flow, a complicated script in languages like PERL is needed. For long-running jobs, the user has to continuously check job status to learn when results can be accessed. Furthermore, special software is needed for a user to remotely login to the computation servers and the user must know on which machine an application of interest resides. This paper describes "Engineering Computing Portal, " an architecture and its implementation for simplifying the use of scientific and engineering applications using Web technology and lightweight high performance CORBA technology.