The BORG distributed architecture for high-performance computing

Networked computer clusters present the opportunity for low-cost high-performance computing and call for new programming paradigms to effectively exploit the distributed computational power. This paper describes the Brokered Objects for Ragged-network Gigaflops (BORG) developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University. The BORG programming system allows its users to program in the logical domain of the problems without concern of the underlying computer network. Data dependencies are automatically translated by the system into CORBA object invocations as needed. The CORBA-based approach makes it easy for a BORG system to be configured dynamically with components running on different platforms, operation system, and programming languages. It supports programming under the model of divide-and-conquer with distributed array objects that can be recursively divided and combined. Applications for radar signal propagation, information retrieval, and space-craft simulation are being developed on BORG.