Distributed Computing Using Java RMI
(Remote Method Invocation)

Hongping Liang
hliang@curagen.com
Bioinformatics Department
CuraGen Corporation
New Haven, CT

Sung-Chi Chu
schu@runet.edu
Computer Science Department

Jurgen Gerlach
jgerlach@runet.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Department
Radford University
Radford, VA 24142
USA

Abstract

This paper investigates another approach to realize distributed computing in a network environment using Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation). RMI is a collection of API (Application Programming Interface) developed by JavaSoft that allows objects to be used in a remote manner. Objects in this paper are computationally intensive tasks that can be distributed on different virtual machines to realize a reasonable speedup.

However, because of the security restrictions, an Applet running within a browser can only make a network connection to the host that it comes from. It can only talk directly to the server machine of its origin and cannot make a network connection to any other machines. Therefore, through the Applet, objects can not be directly distributed to several machines at the same time, and parallel processing can not be achieved. On the other hand, the Applet plays a very important role in the internet application and users can access it from any machines of different platform and from anywhere.

To get around this awkward situation, we develop a two tier scheme using RMI, which will allows the users to use browser as the interface and on the back-end, a parallel processing can be extensively utilized for mathematical research.

? 1999, ATCM, Inc.