The Computing Facilities Branch, Distributed systems Branch, and the Scientific Computing Resource Center will collaborate on 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 FY93, we ordered the hardware and software needed to set up a small (5-machine) DCE test cell running DCE core services only (no distributed file system). We also investigated and ordered two DCE-based software products: Encina, a distributed transaction monitoring system that can provide connectivity between DOS Windows and UNIX clients and DB2 running under MVS, and DAZEL, a distributed document delivery system. In FY94, we plan to setup a DCE core services test cell, and use it to begin evaluation of Encina and DAZEL. We then expect to order and install JAM, a 4GL that is compatible with Encina. We also plan to purchase hardware and software to set up a prototype DCE/DFS fileserver and client workstations, expand the DCE test cell to include additional UNIX clients, and perhaps include DOS Windows and Windows NT clients as well.
