"Symphony - A Component-Based System for Manipulating
	       Distributed, Legacy Computing Resources"
   Dr. Dennis Kafura, Professor and Head, Dept. of Computer Science
			  September 15, 1998

                  Computer Science Graduate Seminar
                          CS 5944 Index 9743
                        Tuesday 3:30 - 4:45 pm
                  Newman Library 6th Floor Boardroom

			    Sponsored by:
			    	Department of Computer Science
				Information Systems
				University Libraries
				Digital Library Research Laboratory
				Internet Technology Innovation Center

Abstract: 
This talk describes Symphony, an open and extensible Java-based
framework for composing and manipulating distributed legacy
resources. Symphony allows users to compose visually a collection of
programs and data by specifying data-flow relationships among them and
provides a client/server framework for transparently executing the
composed application. Additionally, the framework is web-aware and
helps integrate web-based resources with legacy resources. Symphony,
using Sun Microsystems' JavaBeans component architecture, has been
applied in the construction of prototype problem-solving environments
for two science and engineering applcations.


Biography:
Dr. Dennis Kafura is a Professor of Computer Science and Department
Head. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from
Purdue University in 1972 and 1974 and joined the faculty at Virginia
Tech in 1981.  His most recent work has focused on applying his
background in operating systems, software engineering and
object-oriented programming to building systems that are concurrent,
distributed, and parallel. This work involves finding novel ways of
expressing concurrency and achieving synchronization in
object-oriented languages, automatically reclaiming system resources
in a distributed, concurrent system, transparently transmitting data
among heterogeneous computer systems, defining both a theory and a
practical technology for expressing and enforcing coordination among
active, concurrent objects, and performing parallel computation using
the Message Passing Interface standard in an object-oriented language.

kafura@cs.vt.edu (email)  540.231.5568 (office)  540.231.6931 (dept.)