Scientific Component Technology Initiative

Abstract

The laboratory has invested a significant amount of resources towards the development of high-performance scientific simulation software, including numerical libraries, visualization, steering, software frameworks, and physics packages. Unfortunately, because this software was not designed for interoperability and re-use, it is often difficult to share these sophisticated software packages among applications due to differences in implementation language, programming style, or calling interfaces. This LDRD Strategic Initiative investigated and developed software component technology for high-performance parallel scientific computing to address problems of complexity, re-use, and interoperability for laboratory software. Component technology is an extension of scripting and object-oriented software development techniques that specifically focuses on the needs of software interoperability. Component approaches based on CORBA, COM, and Java technologies are widely used in industry; however, they do not support massively parallel applications in science and engineering. Our research focused on the unique requirements of scientific computing on ASCI-class machines, such as fast in-process connections among components, language interoperability for scientific languages, and data distribution support for massively parallel SPMD components.