Configuring scientific applications in a heterogeneous distributed system

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Abstract
Scientific applications are often most naturally structured as a collection of interacting software components executing on heterogeneous machines connected by a network. For example, an application might consist of a visualization tool on a graphics workstation that displays data generated by a scientific simulation on a parallel machine, which in turn uses a data repository on a storage server for input. Yet, despite having the structure of a distributed program, the support provided for configuring applications in this domain has generally been minimal at best. Here, an approach to configuring scientific applications based on the Schooner interconnection system is described. One key aspect of Schooner is a machine- and language-independent interface specification that is used to generate interface code to bind components into the application and map them onto suitable host architectures. The other is a runtime system that implements support for both static and dynamic configuration. This paper describes the Schooner application model, outlines the method of creating component interfaces, and describes the runtime system and its various configuration options. In contrast with traditional configuration management systems, Schooner is a communication system that provides underlying support for the configuration requirements of scientific applications rather than a general high-level tool for distributed programming.

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