Model-driven and component-based framework for scientific applications

Abstract

Interactive scientific visualization applications have been more and more used to observe, analyze and understand the complex phenomena studied in several scientific disciplines such as (nano-sciences, fluid simulations, etc.). To facilitate the coupling of the different computation, visualization and exploration codes, which are often heterogeneous and difficult to cooperate, scientists must be able to use and reuse the different parts of the applications already built in order to interchange and enrich certain parts without being experts. In this context, a middleware called FlowVR has been developed by the scientific community leading to make applications divided into set of components exchanging messages. Moreover, this middleware enables to encapsulate existing codes in components, interconnect them via data links, and deploy them on distributed computing resources. Nevertheless, FlowVR does not offer any capability to check the functional correctness of new developed component-based applications. This paper presents a framework called Model and Component-based framework for Scientific Applications (MCSA) based on a interplay of model-driven and component-based software engineering. On the one hand, we provide a domain specific language dedicated to physics/chemistry scientists in order to built their MCSA applications. This language also allows to capitalize efforts by proposing existing components that have been already developed. On the other hand, we propose a model transformation to check the correctness of instantiated models, for this, we use a new subclass of Petri net called strict Colored FIFO Nets (sCFN). Our approach has been backed by a case study relies on a molecular dynamics application.