Evaluating the performance of CORBA for distributed and grid computing applications

Distributed computing applications rely, on transmissions of messages between processes. However as workstations are not intended to manage this kind of communications, it is necessary to use some communication tools known as Message Passing libraries. Currently, MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) are the most used. In addition, the need for interoperability among the rapidly proliferating number of hardwares and softwares led to the definition of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), which standardizes the execution support of distributed object applications. This architecture offers a good interoperability and encapsulation support. Moreover, its method invocation mechanism, offers several features and can be used as a good communication model. Consequently, the use of such architecture for distributed and grid computing applications seems interesting and promising. However, CORBA is always criticized on the performances level. By taking account of all these elements, a performance evaluation of CORBA seems necessary. The topic of this paper is to present our benchmark results of some CORBA implementations (ORBacus and TAO) and to compare them with those of the two message passing libraries MPI (MPICH and LAM) and PVM, by using a Network of Work Stations (NOW).