Scientific Software Component Technology

We are developing new software component technology for high-performance parallel scientific computing to address issues of complexity, re-use, and interoperability for laboratory software. Component technology enables cross-project code re-use, reduces software development costs, and provides additional simulation capabilities for massively parallel laboratory application codes. The success of our approach will be measured by its impact on DOE mathematical and scientific software efforts. Thus, we are collaborating closely with library developers and application scientists in the Common Component Architecture forum, the Equation Solver Interface forum, and other DOE mathematical software groups to gather requirements, write and adopt a variety of design specifications, and develop demonstration projects to validate our approach. Numerical simulation is essential to the science mission at the laboratory. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the complexity of modern simulation software. Computational scientists develop complex, three-dimensional, massively parallel, full-physics simulations that require the integration of diverse software packages written by outside development teams. Currently, the integration of a new software package, such as a new linear solver library, can require several months of effort. Current industry component technologies such as CORBA, JavaBeans, and COM have all been used successfully in the business domain to reduce software development costs and increase software quality. However, these existing industry component infrastructures will not scale to support massively parallel applications in science and engineering. In particular, they do not address issues related to high-performance parallel computing on ASCI-class machines, such as fast in-process connections between components, language interoperability for scientific languages such as Fortran, parallel data redistribution between components, and massively parallel components. While industrial component systems do not directly address scientific computing issues, we leverage existing industry technologies and design concepts whenever possible

Aviation System Analysis Capability Executive Assistant Design

In this technical document, we describe the design developed for the Aviation System Analysis Capability (ASAC) Executive Assistant (EA) Proof of Concept (POC). We describe the genesis and role of the ASAC system, discuss the objectives of the ASAC system and provide an overview of components and models within the ASAC system, and describe the design process and the results of the ASAC EA POC system design. We also describe the evaluation process and results for applicable COTS software. The document has six chapters, a bibliography, three appendices and one attachment

An architectural comparison of distributed object technologies

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-117).by Jay Ongg.M.Eng

Reconfigurable middleware architectures for large scale sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks, in an effort to be energy efficient, typically lack the high-level abstractions of advanced programming languages. Though strong, the dichotomy between these two paradigms can be overcome. The SENSIX software framework, described in this dissertation, uniquely integrates constraint-dominated wireless sensor networks with the flexibility of object-oriented programming models, without violating the principles of either. Though these two computing paradigms are contradictory in many ways, SENSIX bridges them to yield a dynamic middleware abstraction unifying low-level resource-aware task reconfiguration and high-level object recomposition. Through the layered approach of SENSIX, the software developer creates a domain-specific sensing architecture by defining a customized task specification and utilizing object inheritance. In addition, SENSIX performs better at large scales (on the order of 1000 nodes or more) than other sensor network middleware which do not include such unified facilities for vertical integration

The use of agents and objects to integrate virtual enterprises

The manufacturing complex for the Department of Energy (DOE) is distributed: design laboratories, manufacturing facilities, and industrial partners. Designers must have a concurrent engineering environment to support all aspects of the cradle-to-grave product realization process across the distributed sites. Engineers must be able to analyze and simulate processes, retrieve and process heterogeneous information, both archived and current, and access multiple databases. Manufacturers must be able to coordinate activities of various manufacturing centers, which may involve a negotiation process. Furthermore, Sandia must be able to export manufacturing capabilities, such as on-machine acceptance, to outside suppliers. A key element to making this a reality is a flexible information architecture. The DOE information architecture must support a wide-area virtual enterprise, with distributed intelligent software components. The architecture must provide for asynchronous communication; multiple programming languages and operating systems; incorporation of geographically distributed manufacturing services; various hardware platforms; and heterogeneous workstations, PC`s, machine tool controllers, and special-purpose compute engines. Further, it is critical that manufacturing facilities are not isolated from design, planning, and other business activities and that information flows easily and bidirectionally between these activities. To accomplish this seamlessly, heterogeneous knowledge must be exchanged across both domain and organizational boundaries. Distributed object and software agent technologies are two methods for connecting such engineering and manufacturing systems. The two technologies have overlapping goals - interoperability and architectural support for integrating software components - though to date little or no integration of the two technologies has been made

04511 Abstracts Collection -- Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components

From 12.12.04 to 17.12.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar 04511 ``Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

An approach to building a secure and persistent distributed object management system

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) is a widely accepted standard to provide a system level framework in design and implementation of distributed objects. The core of the Object Management Architecture (OMA) is an Object Request Broker (ORB), which provides transparency of object location, activation, and communications. However, the specification provided by the OMG is not sufficient. For instance, there are no security specifications when handling object requests through the ORBs. The lack of such a security service prevents the use of CORBA from handling sensitive data such as personal and corporate financial information; In view of the above, this thesis identifies, explores, and provides an approach to handling secure objects in a distributed environment along with a persistent object service using the CORBA specification. The research specifically involves the design and implementation of a secured distributed object service. This object service requires a persistent service and object storage for storing and retrieving security specific information. To provide a secure distributed object environment, a secure object service using the specifications provided by the OMG has been designed and implemented. In addition, to preserve the persistence of secure information, an object service has been implemented to provide a persistent data store; The secure object service can provide a framework for handling distributed object in applications requiring security clearance such as distributed banking, online stock tradings, internet shopping, geographic and medical information systems

Next generation satellite orbital control system

Selection of the correct software architecture is vital for building successful software-intensive systems. Its realization requires important decisions about the organization of the system and by and large permits or prevents a system\u27s acceptance and quality attributes such as performance and reliability. The correct architecture is essential for program success while the wrong one is a formula for disaster. In this investigation, potential software architectures for the Next Generation Satellite Orbital Control System (NG-SOCS) are developed from compiled system specifications and a review of existing technologies. From the developed architectures, the recommended architecture is selected based on real-world considerations that face corporations today, including maximizing code reuse, mitigation of project risks and the alignment of the solution with business objectives