The SCIJump Framework for Parallel and Distributed Scientific Computing

In recent years, software component technology has been a su ccessful methodology for large-scale commercial software development. Compone nt technology combines a set of frequently used functions in an easily reusable comp onent and makes the implementation transparent to the users or other component s. Developers create new software applications by connecting groups of components. Component technology is becoming increasingly popular for large-scale scientifi c computing to help tame software complexity resulting from coupling multiple disc iplines, multiple scales, and/or multiple physical phenomena. In this chapter, we discuss our SCIJump Problem Solving Envi ro ment (PSE), that builds on its successful predecessor SCIRun and the DOE Common Component Architecture (CCA) scientific component model. SCIJump pro vides distributed computing, parallel components and the ability to combine c omponents from several component models in a single application. These tools provi de the ability to use a larger set of computing resources to solve a wider set of pro blems. For even larger applications that may require thousands of computin g resources and tens of thousands of component instances, we present our prototy pe scalable distributed component framework technology called CCALoop. When the tec hnology described in CCALoop matures, it will be included in SCIJump. SCIRun is a scientific PSE that allows interactive construct ion and steering of large-scale scientific computations [25, 27, 26, 18, 17, 19] . A scientific application is constructed by connecting computational elements (modu les) to form a program (network), as shown in Figure 1.1. The program may contain se veral computational

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