Lessons Learned from Using CORBA for Components in Scientific Computing

The use of component architectures to solve the problen of reuse and interoperability on scientific computing has ben investigated by various research groups during thel last years. Moreover, architectures for Internet accessible mathematical services have been proposed. In the paper we give a brief abstract requirements analyses with respect to these problems and show that there is an existing technology that solves most of the requirements. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) provides a component franework that can be used for Internet accessible mathematical services snd also for the efficient reuse of medium grained size functionality. We give some examples on the use of CORBA with respect to both applications. We provide measurement data which show that components of a granulatiy of less than 100 ms can be reused with an acceptibly small overhead.