Pluggability Issues in a Mathematics Protocol

    There are many advantages to providing communication links between
    independent scientific applications, including the ability to do
    parallel distributed computation, distributed problem solving,
    and, generally, providing access to a wealth of computational
    resources within a single framework.  Important problems to solve
    include data and control integration.  Solving these problems
    separately is an essential aspect of the design and implementation
    of a protocol for mathematics.  The Multi Protocol (MP)
    specification addresses the exchange of mathematical data by
    focusing only on the data encoding issues.  In this way, MP can be
    either plugged into various pre-existing data transport mechanisms
    addressing control integration, or augmented by a higher
    control-related protocol layer.  Our implementation of MP is
    independent of the data transport mechanism and can work with
    several devices.  An application puts/gets data to/from MP buffers
    which communicates with the transport device through an abstract
    device interface.  Currently there are transport interfaces for
    files, TCP sockets, PVM, and ToolBus.  This paper describes the
    general design of the interface between MP and a transport device
    and the lessons we have learned during its implementation.