Integrating Component-Based Scientific Computing Software

In recent years, software component technology has been a successful methodology for large-scale commercial software development. Component technology combines a set of frequently used functions in an easily reusable form and makes the implementation transparent to the users or other components. Developers create new software applications by connecting together a group of components. Component technology is becoming increasingly popular for large-scale scientific computing for helping to tame the software complexity required in coupling multiple disciplines, multiple scales, and/or multiple physical phenomena. In the chapter, we discuss the successes achieved through the SCIRun Problem Solving Environment (PSE), and the biomedically oriented BioPSE. Notwithstanding these successes, component software systems for scientific computing provide a limited form of interoperability, typically working only with other components that employ the same underlying component model. As such, we propose a next generation concept of meta-components, where software components can be manipulated in a more abstract manner, providing a plug-in architecture for component models, and bridges between them, allowing for interoperability between different component models. These abstract, meta-components are manipulated and managed by a new software framework, called SCIRun2, while concrete, standard component models perform the actual work. This facility allows components implemented with disparate component models to be orchestrated together. As an example of a multi-component system, we have used this system to connect components from SCIRun, the Insight Toolkit (ITK), the Visualization Toolkit (Vtk), and the DOE Common Component