We propose an aspect-oriented approach for the development of simulation software aiming at increasing the flexibility, the rapidity of development, and maintainability of simulation software. The horizontal decomposition method is used to separate the core functionality of the simulation application from simulation-specific cross-cutting concerns like distribution, tool integration, persistence, and fault tolerance. We analyze an existing dispersion simulation application to demonstrate the applicability of our approach and provide a proof of concept in form of the aspect-oriented implementation of two cross-cutting concerns, namely distribution and tool integration.
Abstract-Computer simulation is an important factor in today's disaster prevention procedures. Simulation codes assess the evolution and impact of various physical phenomena in domains such as nuclear and environmental sciences, and ultimately help saving lives. However, new and more computationally demanding models, and new regulations for personnel training have increased the demand for computational power. While the existing simulation codes can be ported to computing environments that can meet the new demand, such as supercomputers, clusters, and grids, it is too expensive and time-consuming to rewrite and re-certify them. Instead, in this work we propose an aspect-oriented approach that takes existing simulation functionality and combines it with functionality required to run the simulation on different computing environments transparently to the simulation developer. Through experiments in the DAS-3 multi-cluster grid we show that our approach increases the reusability, the maintainability, the scalability, and the robustness of a real disaster prevention simulation, while incurring a low performance overhead.
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