[Pipet Users] Re: Piper questions

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Hi Herbert.

Sorry for the late reply.  Your message was sent to my SMTP system rather
than my regular mail account (jeff at bioinformatics.org).

> 1. Does piper run under windows?

Not currently.  But, since we are writing and rewriting with libraries
which all run under Windows, it should work.  We would only need some
Windows developers to help with the port, since the project leaders all
use *NIX.

> 2. Is it tied in to CORBA?

It is not an extention of CORBA, but we have been using it.  There has
been some discussion about using something else, either for part of Piper
or all of it, or maybe just letting the object broker be pluggable.

> 3. I see you move data back and forth using XML, how are you finding the
> performance, we know that XML-RPC is ten times slower than straight
> binary transfers and our applications requires as good a performance as
> possible
> since we're running numeric simulation applications.

Only "internal" (brokering) information is passed using XML.  Nodes
communicate whichever way they normally would, with some security added by
the broker.  We say that Piper is "agnostic" about communication protocols
and data formats used between nodes.  It puts more of a burden on the
Piper developer, but it makes the system more flexible.

Cheers.
Jeff