Data analysis in an object request broker environment

Computing for the Next Millenium will require software interoperability in heteroge-neous, increasingly object-oriented environments. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture1 (CORBA) is a software industry effort, under the aegis of the Object Management Group (OMG), to standardize mechanisms for software interaction among disparate applications written in a variety of languages and running on a variety of dis-tributed platforms. In this paper, we describe some of the design and performance impli-cations for software that must function in such a brokered environment in a standards-compliant way. We illustrate these implications with a physics data analysis example as a case stud