Improving separation of concerns in the development of scientific applications

Improving separation of concerns in the development of scientific applications Conference

Sadjadi, SM, Martinez, J, Soldo, T et al. (2007). Improving separation of concerns in the development of scientific applications . 456-461.

High performance computing (HPC) is gaining popularity in solving scientific applications. Using the current programming standards, however, it takes an HPC expert to efficiently take advantage of HPC facilities; a skill that a scientist does not necessarily have. This lack of separation of concerns has resulted in scientific applications with rigid code, which entangles non-functional concerns (i.e., the parallel code) into functional concerns (i.e., the core business logic). Effectively, this tangled code hinders the maintenance and evolution of these applications. In this paper, we introduce Transparent Grid Enabler (TGE) that separates the task of developing the business logic of a scientific application from the task of improving its performance. TGE achieves this goal by integrating two existing software tools, namely, TRAP/J and GRID superscalar. A simple matrix multiplication program is used as a case study to demonstrate the current use and capabilities of TGE. Copyright © (2007) by Knowledge Systems Institute (KSI).