The Collaboratory Interoperability Framework Project (CIF)

The CIF Demo at SC98

This project is a research and development project sponsored by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division, within the Office of Energy Research of the Department of Energy. The project is part of the DOE 2000 program. The CIF project is a multi-laboratory effort including personnel from ANL, PNNL, SNL, and LBL.

The CIF project aims to develop a distributed computing software bus which supports software components for scientific collaboratories developed by diverse DoE and non DoE groups.The goal of the project is to reduce duplication of effort, enhance interoperability and promote interlab cooperation by developing a common communication library for all projects.

Motivation: Currently, components for different DoE collaboratory projects are developed in isolation without regard to their ability to interwork with each other. This approach, while allowing for quick prototyping, does present difficulties in providing interoperability between components and in ensuring their portability.

One of the significant products of this project will be the common communication library which includes both unicast and multicast with various levels of reliability and ordering capabilities. Reliable multicast provides efficient data dissemination across geographically distant collaborating sites. However, there are hardly any quality implementations of reliable multicast available, and no standards established. As part of this project we are working on a new group communication system that will scale to groups spread across a wide-area network. The new group communication system is called InterGroup. One aspect of this project is to conduct research in this field, and to provide a common interface to a suite of diverse communication protocols, reliable multicast included.

This communication infrastructure integrates with the CORBA architecture. We plan to adopt CORBA interfaces due to the availability of well documented CORBA standards and its interoperability with commercial systems. Currently many collaboratory components are being developed in Java for enhanced portability and accesability, but suffer from a lack of a convenient communication API. We propose to develop a Java interface that promotes convenient,flexible and protocol-independent communication while retaining all the advantages that Java already provides.

CIF Publications

The InterGroup Protocols: Scalable Group Communication for the Internet,
K. Berket PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2000

Standards-Based Software Infrastructure for Collaborative Environment and Distributed Computing Applications,
D. Agarwal, I. Foster and T. Strayer, White Paper.

The Collaboratory Interoperability Framework Common Application Programming Interface
D. Agarwal, K. Berket, N. Narasimhan, P. Schabert, I. Foster, S. Tuecke, http://www-itg.lbl.gov/CIF/Reports/GcommonAPI.html

CIF Presentations

Collaboratory Interoperability Framework (CIF),
Project status report given at the Jan 7-9, 1998 DOE 2000 meeting in Reston, VA.

Other CIF and collaboratories publications, presentations and demonstrations

Please also visit the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Home Page. Imaging and Distributed Computing Group Home Page. Distributed Collaboratories Home Page.
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This document was last updated on December 08, 2000, and is located at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/OldProjects/CIF/homepage.html.

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