Ligature: Component Architecture for High Performance Applications

The increasing feasibility of developing applications spanning nationwide supercomputing resources makes possible the creation of simulations composed of multiple interdisciplinary components and capable of modeling natural and social phenomena of national importance with unprecedented speed and accuracy. However, the potential offered by hardware technology often fails to be fully realized due to the lack of software environments supporting such efforts. Furthermore, the complexity of combining within one application components with different performance characteristics often prevents such applications from achieving required performance levels. The Ligature project at LANL addresses the issue of designing a software infrastructure enabling fast and efficient development of multi-component applications, and that of providing performance guidance to the programmer using this infrastructure. Ligature allows the programmer to define component interfaces specifying how heterogeneous, distributed components can interact within a larger system and provides a reusable infrastructure capable of connecting these components. These interfaces, as well as information about component performance are accessible through a database. Within this framework we are trying to understand how information about the performance of individual components, and information about performance of the framework can be combined to develop a performance-aware multicomponent application.