Component Technology for HighPerformance Scientific Simulation Software

Abstract We are developing scientific software component technology to manage the complexity of modern, parallel simulation software and increase the interop-erability and re-use of scientific software packages. In this paper, we describe a language interoperability tool named Babel that enables the creation and dis-tribution of language-independent software libraries using interface definition language (IDL) techniques. We have created a scientific IDL that focuses on the unique interface description needs of scientific software, such as complex numbers, dense multidimensional arrays, and parallel distributed objects. Pre-liminary results indicate that in addition to language interoperability, this ap-proach provides useful tools for the design of modern object-oriented scientific software libraries. We also describe a web-based component repository called Alexandria that facilitates the distribution, documentation, and re-use of scien-tific components and libraries