Mobility of Legacy Code

Illinois Institute Of Technology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Mobility is a primary functionality of next generation computing, and intensive work has been done in recent years on mobile agents and mobile computing. However, most of the current successes are based on safe-languages such as Java. While this safe-language approach provides a satisfactory solution for many applications, it has inherent limitations, especially for technical computing applications which use legacy code such as C, Fortran, or C++. And since most technical computing and applications use these "legacy" systems, they will not be able to take advantage of the work that has been done on safe-languages such as Java. The proposal plans to develop the High Performance Computing Mobility (HPCM) middleware, which will increase the mobility of legacy codes written in C, Fortran or C++. HPCM consists of different components including middleware interface, pre-compiler system, run-time libraries and so forth. HPCM can also be used as a low-level layer under Java to support mobility of local native codes. HPCM can support complex data strutures, heterogenous netework evnironments, and scalable parallel computing. HPCM is designed to increase the mobility while maintaining the high performance of legacy codes. There are a number of research questions which the proposal plans to address, and, the success of HPCM will benefit many on-going and future research projects.