The Common Component Architecture (CCA) provides a means for software developers to manage the complexity of large-scale scientific simulations and to move toward a plug-and-play environment for high-performance computing. In the scientific computing context, component models also promote collaboration using independently developed software, thereby allowing particular individuals or groups to focus on the aspects of greatest interest to them. The CCA supports parallel and distributed computing as well as local high-performance connections between components in a language-independent manner. The design places minimal requirements on components and thus facilitates the integration of existing code into the CCA environment. The CCA model imposes minimal overhead to minimize the impact on application performance. The focus on high performance distinguishes the CCA from most other component models. The CCA is being applied within an increasing range of disciplines, including combustion research, global climate simulation, and computational chemistry.
SUMMARYThe Common Component Architecture (CCA) is a component model for high-performance computing, developed by a grass-roots effort of computational scientists. Although the CCA is usable with CORBA-like distributed-object components, its main purpose is to set forth a component model for high-performance, parallel computing. Traditional component models are not well suited for performance and massive parallelism. We outline the design pattern for the CCA component model, discuss our strategy for language interoperability, describe the development tools we provide, and walk through an illustrative example using these tools. Performance and scalability, which are distinguishing features of CCA components, affect choices throughout design and implementation.
Abstract-High-performance scientific applications are usually built from software modules written in multiple programming languages. This raises the issue of language interoperability which involves making calls between languages, converting basic types, and bridging disparate programming models. Babel provides a featurerich, extensible, high-performance solution to the language interoperability problem currently supporting C, C++, FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90/95, Fortran 2003/2008, Python, and Java. Babel supports object-oriented programming features and interface semantics with runtime-enforcement. In addition to in-process language interoperability, Babel includes remote method invocation to support hybrid parallel and distributed computing paradigms.
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