ABSTRACT
Middleware plays an important role in bridging the high performance communications goals of the application level and the capabilities and capacities of the underlying physical layer. In Chapter 11, we have already seen the effectiveness of MPI in this context. MPI couples both a relatively rich communications middleware infrastructure and a process invocation model that works extraordinarily well for the set of high performance applications that are its focus. However, the need for high performance communications extends beyond that set of applications, including ones that need a less rigid process model, more flexible type handling, or support for higher-level discovery services. This chapter looks at one solution for these sorts of high performance needs, namely the event-based, publish-subscribe middleware approach.
