An XML based component model for generating scientiffic applications and performing large scale simulations in a meta-computing environment

Abstract

The architecture of a component based environment for constructing scientiffic applications - generally referred to as a Problem Solving Environment (PSE), is described. Each component is a self contained program, and may be a sequential code developed in C, Fortran or Java, or may contain internal parallelism using MPI or PVM libraries. A user visually constructs an application by combining components from a local or remote repository as a data flow graph. Components are self-documenting, with their interfaces deffined in XML, which enables a user to search for components suitable to a particular application, enables a component to be conffigured when instantiated, enables each component to register with an event listener and facilitates the sharing of components between repositories. The data flow graph is also encoded in XML, and sent to a resource manager for executing the application on a work- station cluster, or a heterogeneous environment made of workstations and high performance parallel machines. Components in the PSE can also wrap legacy codes. We also describe the architecture and implementation of a molecular dynamics application based on the Lennard-Jones code [18], containing MPI calls, executed on a cluster of workstations, and based on our generic component model. A user can submit simulation data to the application remotely using a Java based user interface. Users need not download any softwares for the simulation and do not need to know the exact implementation.