The Computing Facilities Branch is developing a successor to the Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW) system based on the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), and will also devise and carry out a plan for migrating the ALW system to its DCE successor. Migration to DCE is necessary because DCE, as an emerging de facto industry standard, will eventually supercede the AFS distributed file system upon which the current ALW system is based. Also, DCE will allow us to extend ALW distributed systems technology to the PC, Macintosh, and the Convex and IBM mainframes, thereby advancing DCRT's strategic plan to provide interoperability among these systems. In FY96, we expanded the DCE test cell established in FY94 by adding two DCE/DFS fileservers, migrating user account and group information from our production AFS cell, and successfully installing and AFS/DFS protocol adapter to enable existing AFS clients to access DCE/DFS. We also added several Windows clients. We continued to play a prominent role in architectural management activities by participating on the NIH Architectural Management Group NOS and E-mail subcommittees. Most notably, the NIH AMG adopted our strategic plan for implementing DCE NIH-wide. We abandoned our effort with UniPress Software, Inc. to add support for AFS to their LanManager for UNIX (LMU) product in favor of using PC Interface from Locus Computing to enable PCs running DOS and Windows to access AFS files. This commercial product has the functionality we required and has been successfully deployed on a large scale at other AFS sites. We installed and tested Encina, a distributed transaction monitoring system that can provide connectivity between DOS Windows and UNIX clients and a variety of database products, most notably Oracle, Sybase and DB2. We continued to assist the Customer Services Branch (CSB) this year in maintaining and improving their electronic Help Desk support system. The service uses Sun ALWs to host a Sybase database engine and Remedy Action Request System software. This year, we added the Remedy software for HP, SGI, and World Wide Web clients. In FY95, we plan to move the servers for DCE core services to three dedicated machines suitable for production use. Each of these machines will be installed in a different building to protect against disasters. We also plan to use DCE/DFS more intensively, and to conduct a pilot test of the PC Interface gateway software. In the area of client/server database technology, we plan to install and test various DCE-based products, including Open Horizon Connection/DCE, EncinaBuilder, and Encina for Windows.
