Compframe 2005

Atlanta, GA, June 22-23, 2005

Exploring the Design Space for CCA Framework Interoperability Approaches.
Michael J. Lewis, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, and Kenneth Chiu
Abstract
One important challenge to building and deploying high performance scientific applications in grid environments is providing a software development model that abstracts the complexity of the environment and simplifies the programmers task, allowing her to focus on the details of her particular application. Component frameworks, including those that support the Common Component Architecture (CCA), represent a promising approach to addressing this challenge, one that is being realized, for example, in our LegionCCA and XCAT-C++ frameworks. The next step beyond building independent individual frameworks is making them interoperate. Component-based applications should be able to transparently span multiple disjoint component frameworks with low overhead as compared to the same applications running within a single framework. Interoperable frameworks enable applications to take advantage of more resources, and to better match constituent parts to the underlying resources that best support them. This paper identifies five underlying component framework interoperability requirements, and three general approaches to addressing them. We then discuss how the approaches can be applied to meet the requirements, and address the advantages, issues, and implications of doing so. This effectively defines a design space for framework interoperability approaches.
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