Fujitsu Developed World's First High Performance CORBA which complies with VI Architecture

Tokyo 14 Sep 99 Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has succeeded in developing a world's first high performance CORBA, called "Crisp ORB", which complies with Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture) based on Fujitsu's enterprise application middleware INTERSTAGE to realize efficient development environment for scalable and high performance server application on cluster system. VI Architecture is the standard for interconnect technology for cluster system.

Business on Internet, especially electric commerce market, is rapidly growing. In order to manage growing business on Internet, two key technologies, cluster system for scalable server application and component oriented development environment for distributed application running on cluster system, are most important.

Fujitsu has been developed and released Synfinity interconnect technology product using VI Architecture which defines standard communication protocol and architecture for low latency and high throughput interconnection among servers. By applying Synfinity in connection among server nodes, Fujitsu has been provided high performance and high scalable cluster systems. On the other hand, Fujitsu has been provided enterprise application middleware INTERSTAGE based on international standard object technology CORBA for component oriented application development on distributed environment.

In development of CrispORB, Synfinity interconnect technology was applied in INTERSTAGE's CORBA function to adapt component oriented development environment of INTERSTAGE to cluster system. This technology fusion allow application developers to build distributed server application rapidly and reliably.

Highlights of New Technology:
a) Apply Synfinity interconnect technology
Synfinity has a special hardware feature called Remote-DMA that transfers data between memory area located on different nodes not consuming any CPU resources. Usually CORBA uses standard protocol called IIOP(*5) based on TCP/IP for communication among servers. CrispORB skips protocol overhead of TCP/IP using Synfinity's remote-DMA.

b) Hide difference of communication protocols from application
Application on CrispORB can communicate both with another application on Internet using IIOP and with another application on cluster using CrispORB. In spite of that, application need not to be aware of the difference between communication layers, because CrispORB choices the transport between Synfinity and TCP/IP automatically.

c) Compliance with VI Architecture
CrispORB uses VI Architecture, that was proposed as a industrial standard for communication between servers, in low communication layer.

d) Preserve CORBA language mapping
CORBA standard defines mapping between each programming language and CORBA so that a component written by a programming language can communication with other component written by another language. Because CrispORB preserves the language mapping specified by CORBA standard, component on CrispORB written as conventional CORBA component still has compatibility.


By technology (a) above, CrispORB cut off 25% of latency compare with IIOP in short size request's invocation which often appears in transaction processing of business component and which influences computing performance. By technology (b) and (d), application developers can use CrispORB's advanced communication function without detailed knowledge of communication layer.

Fujitsu has been developed and released parallel database, text search engine and data mining engine using Synfinity interconnect technology. Adding component infrastructure to the Synfinity based products enable providing advanced cluster system solution to our customer.

 

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