Programming High Performance Applications Using Components

Abstract

Computational Grids promise to be the next generation of high-performance computing resources. However, programming such computing infrastructures will be extremely challenging. Current programming practices tend to be based on existing and well understood models such as message-passing and SPMD (single program multiple data). On-going works based on Web services (OGSA) aims at programming Grids by specifying the coordination through the expression of interaction and dependencies between already deployed web services. This talk will focus on another alternative that aims at programming Grids with software components. With such an approach, it will be possible to install components on remote resources and to express interaction between components. This presentation will describe work in progress to develop a component-based software infrastructure, called Padico, for computational Grids based on the CORBA Component Model (CCM) from the Object Management Group (OMG). The objective of Padico is to offer a component model targeting multi-physics simulations or any applications that require the coupling of several codes (simulation or visualisation) within a high-performance environment. Two issues will be addressed during the talk: encapsulation of codes into components and runtime support for efficient communication between components within a Grid. This talk will look at the GridCCM component model, an extension to the CCM model to address the encapsulation of SPMD parallel codes into a component and a communication framework, called PadicoTM, able to efficiently support various communication runtime and middleware in an heterogeneous networking environment.