Research
The TASCS project is organized into four focus areas, which include maturing the CCA environment and tools, developing a “component ecosystem”, leveraging the component environment to provide new capabilities to software developers, and helping computational scientists effectively use component technology.
Component Technology Initiatives
| Coordinator: | Lois Curfman McInnes, ANL |
The Component Technology Initiatives focus on utilizing and extending the component model to provide new “value added” capabilities for CCA users.
Emerging High-Performance Computing Hardware and Software Paradigms (HPC)
| Coordinator: | Daniel Chavarria, PNNL | Participants: | ORNL, PNNL |
The HPC initiative focuses on developing component-based tools to help applications manage higher/hybrid levels of parallelism through a multiple-component multiple-data (MCMD) paradigm; this work includes support for hardware co-processors such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
For more details, see the CCA Forum MCMD Working Group site…
Software Quality and Verification (SQV)
| Coordinator: | Tammy Dahlgren, LLNL | Participants: | LLNL, ORNL |
This initiative focuses on automating the use of domain-specific behavioral and Computational Quality of Service (CQoS) semantics for scientific components. Initial efforts emphasize the specification and verification of functional software “contracts” associated with component interfaces to help developers and users improve the quality of their software.
Computational Quality of Service and Adaptivity (CQoS)
| Coordinator: | Lois Curfman McInnes, ANL | Participants: | ANL, SNL |
CQoS focuses on mechanisms to dynamically adapt long-running component-based applications in response to changing conditions (i.e. performance, accuracy, mathematical consistency, reliability, etc.) by composing, substituting, and reconfiguring components on the fly.
For more details, see the CCA Forum CQoS site…
CCA Environment
| Coordinator: | Tom Epperly, LLNL |
This thrust area supprts and improves the foundation of the CCA environment and tools for ease of use and as core technology for other initiatives.
Core Tool Support and Maintenance
| Coordinator: | Ben Allan, SNL | Participants: | ANL, LLNL, ORNL, SNL |
Provides essential software maintenance, porting, and support in the face of changing HPC environments.
Enhancements
| Coordinator: | Tom Epperly, LLNL | Participants: | BU, LLNL, ORNL, SNL, VSU |
Extends the CCA environment with additional features/capabilities required by users and other activities within TASCS. The main areas of research and development include: integration of high-performance BabelRMI into distributed CCA frameworks, inter-framework interoperability, and enhanced language interoperability features.
Usability
| Coordinator: | Matt Sottile, UO | Participants: | LLNL, ORNL, SNL, UO |
Focuses on making CCA technology more accessible to users through the development of tools for semi-automatically wrapping legacy software into the CCA environment, debugging, and testing of components.
CCA Toolkit
| Coordinator: | Rob Armstrong, SNL | Participants: | ANL, IU, LLNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNL, Tech-X, UMD, VSU |
The CCA Toolkit work is dedicated to providing a rich set of components for plug-and-play high-performance computing. Tools are provided that help component developers contribute components that have a uniform build system and “feel” for users of the components.
User and Application Outreach and Support
| Coordinator: | David E. Bernholdt, ORNL | Participants: | ANL, IU, LLNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNL, Tech-X |
This thrust area focuses on assisting applications groups with CCA adoption and usage through direct interactions, and development of documentation, tutorials, and example materials.