use cases: binary XML for scientifc computing

Stephen D. Williams wrote:

>
>
>>
>> what are use cases for nux: what do you plan to use it for?
>>
>> are use cases related to XML Binary Characterization 
>> <http://www.w3.org/TR/xbc-use-cases/>?
>>
>> i am a bit disappointed that scientific requirements are completely 
>> omitted form XBC use cases - the closest i could find is 
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/xbc-use-cases/#FPenergy but it skips over whole 
>> issue how to transfer array of doubles without changing endianess ...
>
>
> I have proposed to the group recently that I create one or more use 
> cases that cover supercomputing, grid processing, and sensor networks.

great to hear this. i think we worked in all those areas -it seems XML 
became very popular and now wit convergence on Grid Web Services having 
efficient binary XML format that can be used between "optimized" peers 
seems to be very important ...

> Your observation seems to validate that point.  I would be happy to 
> incorporate anything you could provide.  My company builds and 
> maintains Linux supercomputers and I have present and past experience 
> with grid-like processing, so I have some resources and contacts.
>
>> we did lot of work in past related to XML performance (in Indiana 
>> University and Binghamton) and are very concerned that whatever 
>> binary XML will be characterized/standardized in W3C will be of no 
>> much use for scientific computing and grids ...
>
>
> Could you provide links or details to any of this work?  

we worked on SOAP parsing and optimization for scientific computing:

Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Aleksander Slominski, Venkatash Choppella, 
Randall Bramley, and Dennis Gannon. Requirements for and evaluation of 
RMI protocols for scientific computing 
<http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xgws/papers/sc00_paper/>. In Proceedings 
of SC00 Conference, Dallas TX, Nov 2000. Available on CD-ROM from IEEE
Kenneth Chiu, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, and Randall Bramley. 
Investigating the limits of SOAP performance for scientific computing 
<http://www.computer.org/proceedings/hpdc/1686/16860246abs.htm>. In The 
11-th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed 
Computing HPDC-11 2002 (HPDC'02), Jul 2002.
Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Aleksander Slominski, Kenneth Chiu, Pu Liu, 
Robert van Engelen, and Michael J. Lewis. Toward Characterizing the 
Performance of SOAP Toolkits 
<http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xgws/papers/soap_perf_char_grid2004.pdf>. 
In 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing, November 2004
Kenneth Chiu and Wei Lu. A Compiler-Based Approach to Schema-Specific 
XML Parsing <http://wam.inrialpes.fr/www-workshop2004/ChiuLu.pdf>. In 
First International Worksop on High Performance XML Processing(Satellite 
of WWW2004), May 2004.
Kenneth Chiu. XBS: A Streaming Binary Serializer for High Performance 
Computing. In Proceedings of the High Performance Computing Symposium 
2004. Society for Computer Simulation International, 2004

however we never got enough forward momentum to come up with a proposal 
for binary XML but still we are willing to work to get use cases described.

> How do you think that XML, espeically a binary characterized XML, 
> should related to HDF5?

HDF5 looks to me like a separate problem as it defines its own schema 
for its own representation so that is a big task how to make HDF5 to XML 
Infoset.

we are more interested in how to transfer scientific data (mostly arrays 
of primitive types or simple structs with primitive types that can be 
perfectly well expressed in XML Infoset but are also extremely 
inefficient including dreaded IEEE float conversion to string and back) 
and make it consistent with XML messaging (such as SOAP).

thanks,

alek

-- 
The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay