Communications layer

NES environments can be implemented using a classic socket communication layer. Several problems to this approach have been pointed out such as the lack of portability or limits on the number of sockets that can be opened concurrently. Our aim is to implement and deploy a distributed NES environment that works at a wider scale. Distributed object environments, such as Java, DCOM or CORBA have proved to be a good base for building applications that manage access to distributed services. They not only provide transparent communications in heterogeneous networks, but they also offer a framework for the large scale deployment of distributed applications. Being open and language independent, CORBA was chosen as the communication layer in DIET.

As recent implementations of CORBA provide communication times close to that of sockets, CORBA is well suited to support distributed applications in a large scale Grid environment. New specialized services can be easily published and existing services can also be used. DIET is based upon OmniORB 4 [19] or later, a free CORBA implementation that provides good communication performance.