Annotation of OpenXM/doc/issac2000/design-outline.tex, Revision 1.2
1.2 ! takayama 1: % $OpenXM: OpenXM/doc/issac2000/design-outline.tex,v 1.1 1999/12/23 10:25:08 takayama Exp $
! 2:
! 3: \section{Design Outline}
! 4:
! 5: As Schefstr\"om clarified in \cite{schefstrom},
! 6: integration of tools and softwares has three dimensions:
! 7: data, control, and user interface.
! 8:
! 9: Data integration concerns with the exchange of data between different
! 10: softwares or same softwares.
! 11: OpenMath \cite{OpenMath} and MP (Multi Protocol) \cite{GKW} are,
! 12: for example, general purpose mathematical data protocols.
! 13: They provides a standard way to express mathematical objects.
! 14: For example,
! 15: \begin{verbatim}
! 16: <OMOBJ> <OMI> 123 </OMI> </OMOBJ>
! 17: \end{verbatim}
! 18: means the (OpenMath) integer $123$ in OpenMath, XML expression.
! 19:
! 20: Control integration concerns with the establishment and management of
! 21: inter software communications.
! 22: Control involves, for example, a way to ask computation to other processes
! 23: and a method to interrupt computations on servers.
! 24: RPC, HTTP, MPI, PVM are regarded as a general purpose control protocols or
! 25: infrastructure.
! 26: MCP (Mathematical Communication Protocol)
! 27: by Wang \cite{iamc} is such a protocol specialized to mathematics.
! 28:
! 29: Although, data and control are orthogonal to each other,
! 30: real world requires both.
! 31: NetSolv \cite{netsolve}, OpenMath$+$MCP, MP$+$MCP \cite{iamc},
! 32: and MathLink of Mathematica provide both data and control integration.
! 33: These are currently studied ways of data and control integration.
! 34: Each integration method has their own special features due to their
! 35: own design goals and design motivations.
! 36: OpenXM is a project aiming to integrate data, control and user interfaces
! 37: from a different emphasis of a set of design goals with other projects.
! 38: To explain our design outline, we start with a list of
! 39: our motivations.
! 40: \begin{enumerate}
! 41: \item Noro, who is one of the authors of OpenXM, has developed a general
! 42: purpose computer algebra system Risa/Asir \cite{asir}.
! 43: A set of functions for interative distributed computations were introduced
! 44: in Risa/Asir version 95xxxx release in 1995.
! 45: The model of computation was RPC (remote procedure call)
! 46: and it had its own serialization method for objects.
! 47: One special feature of this system was that computations of remote servers can
! 48: be interrupted.
! 49: A robust interruption method was provided by having two communication channels
! 50: like ftp, which implements the simple network management protocol.
! 51: As an application of this robust and interractive system,
! 52: a huge Gr\"obner basis was computed
! 53: to determine all replicable functions by Noro and McKay \cite{noro-mckay}.
! 54: However, the protocol was closed in asir and we thought that we should
! 55: design an open protocol.
! 56: \item Takayama, who is also one of the authors of OpenXM, has developed
! 57: a special purpose computer algebra system Kan/sm1 \cite{kan},
! 58: which is a Gr\"obner engine for ring of differential operators $D$ and
! 59: a package for computational algebraic geometry via D-module computations.
! 60: In order to implement algorithms in D-modules due to Oaku
! 61: (see, e.g., \cite{sst-book}),
! 62: factorizations and primary ideal decompositions were necessary.
! 63: Kan/sm1 does not have an implementation for these and had invoked
! 64: Risa/asir as a C library or a unix external program.
! 65: This approach was not satisfactory.
! 66: Especially, we could not write a clean interface code between these
! 67: two systems.
! 68: We thought that it is necessary to provide a data and control protocol
! 69: for Risa/asir to work as a server of factorization and primary ideal
! 70: decomposition.
! 71: \item The number of mathematical softwares is increasing rapidly in the last
! 72: decades of 20th century.
! 73: These are usually ``expert'' systems for one area of mathematics
! 74: such as ideals, groups, numbers, polytopes, and so on.
! 75: They has their own interfaces and data format.
! 76: Interfaces are usually specialied to specific field of mathematics
! 77: or poor because developers do not have time for designing user interface
! 78: languages.
! 79: It is fine for intensive and serious users of these systems.
! 80: %% x2 stands for x^2, specialized for polynomial ring.
! 81: However, for users who want to explore a new area of mathematics with these
! 82: softwares or users who needs these systems only occasionally,
! 83: a unified system will be more convinient.
! 84: For example, if we can call and use mathematical softwares
! 85: like CoCoa, GAP, Macaulay2, Porta, Singular, Snapea, $\ldots$
! 86: from Asir, Axion, Maple, muPAD, Mathematica, and so on,
! 87: it will be wonderful in research and education
! 88: of mathematics. This is an unification of user interfaces of mathematical
! 89: softwares.
! 90: \item We believe that open integrated systems is a future of mathematical
! 91: softwares.
! 92: However, it might be just a dream without relizability.
! 93: We wanted to build a prototype system of such an open system by using
! 94: existing standards, technologies and several mathematical softwares.
! 95: We want to see how far we can go with this approach.
! 96: \end{enumerate}
! 97:
! 98: Motivated with these, we started the OpenXM project with the following
! 99: fundamental architecture.
! 100: \begin{enumerate}
! 101: \item Communication is an exchange of messages. The messages are classifed into
! 102: three types:
! 103: DATA, COMMAND, and others.
! 104: The messages are called OX (OpenXM) messages.
! 105: Mathematical data are wrapped with OX messages.
! 106: We uses standards of mathematical data formats such as OpenMath and MP
! 107: and our own data format (CMO --- Common Mathematical Object format)
! 108: as data expressions.
! 109: \item Servers, which provide services to other processes, are stackmachines.
! 110: The stackmachine is called the
! 111: OX stackmachine.
! 112: Existing mathematical softwares are wrapped with this stackmachine.
! 113: Minimal requirements for a target software wrapped with OX stackmachine
! 114: are as follows:
! 115: \begin{enumerate}
! 116: \item The target must have a seriealized interface such as a character based
! 117: interface.
! 118: \item An output of the target must be machine understandable.
! 119: It should follow a grammer that can be parsed with other softwares.
! 120: \end{enumerate}
! 121: \end{enumerate}
! 122: We are implementing a package which is realizing our wishes stated as motivations.
! 123: It is based on above fundamental architecture.
! 124: For example, the following is a command sequence to ask $1+1$ from
! 125: the asir client to the OX sm1 server:
! 126: \begin{verbatim}
! 127: P = sm1_start();
! 128: ox_push_cmo(P,1); ox_push_cmo(P,1);
! 129: ox_execute_string(P,"add"); ox_pop_cmo(P);
! 130: \end{verbatim}
! 131: The current system, OpenXM on TCP/IP,
! 132: uses client-server model and the TCP/IP for interprocess
! 133: communications.
! 134: A design and implementation on MPI already exist for Risa/asir and
! 135: a OpenXM on MPI is a work in progress.
! 136: We focus only on the system based on TCP/IP in this paper.
! 137:
! 138:
1.1 takayama 139:
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