Design and implementation issues for distributed CCA framework interoperability

Abstract

AbstractComponent frameworks, including those that support the Common Component Architecture (CCA), represent a promising approach to addressing the challenge of building and deploying high‐performance scientific applications in Grid environments, one that is being realized, for example, in our LegionCCA and XCAT‐C++ frameworks. The next step beyond building independent individual frameworks is making them interoperate. Component‐based applications should be able to transparently span multiple disjoint component frameworks with low overhead as compared with the same applications running within a single framework. Interoperable frameworks enable applications to take advantage of more resources, and to better match constituent parts to the underlying resources that best support them. The CCA specification does not prescribe a wire format for inter‐component calls in distributed frameworks, thereby promoting considerable flexibility and customization for the framework developer. This approach thus requires an additional specific strategy outside of the CCA to support interoperability between distributed frameworks. Mandating one common wire format, however, risks choosing the wrong format. We discuss in detail five underlying component framework interoperability requirements, and three general approaches to addressing them. We then discuss how the approaches can be applied to meet the requirements, and address the advantages, issues, and implications of doing so. This effectively defines a design space for framework interoperability approaches. We then address the communication interoperability in detail via a single multi‐protocol communication library called Proteus, and discuss how we have incorporated it into two distinct distributed framework implementations of the CCA specification: LegionCCA and XCAT‐C++. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.