A Component-Based Dataflow Framework for Simulation and Visualization

Reuse in the context of scientific simulation applications has mostly taken the form of procedural or object-oriented libraries. End users of such systems are however often non software experts needing very simple, possibly interactive ways to build applications from domain-specific components and to control their parameters. Integrating independently written (existing or new) code as components should ideally be a simple, possibly automated black-box process. We propose a dataflow-based component framework for simulation and visualization in which large existing C++ application libraries were easily integrated as interactively manipulable components by using a meta-layer objectoriented component abstraction. The path from userlevel requirements to the framework design and implementation decisions is outlined.