Software Integration Implementation

Consortium for Open Multiphysics

Software Integration Implementation

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This particular consortium implementation of the software integration infrastructure will, in large part, refactor portions of the Rocstar multiphysics infrastructure. Development of this infrastructure originated at the University of Illinois DOE ASCI Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) to support the center's massively parallel multiphysics simulation application, Rocstar, and has continued at IllinoisRocstar, a small company formed near the end of the University-based program.

IllinoisRocstar is now licensing these new developments as free, open source, in hopes to help improve their own and others' access to infrastructure which can be readily utilized in developing coupled or composite software systems; with particular attention to more rapid production and utilization of multiphysics applications in the HPC environment.

There are two major pieces to the consortium implementation, the Application Component Toolkit (ACT), and the Multiphysics Application Coupling Toolkit (IMPACT). The current development focus is the ACT, which is (will be) the substrate for IMPACT.

The ACT itself is built up from the components described in the technical approach. In particular, the ACT has the following major components:

1. The Component Object Manager (COM): The COM package provides encapsulation of user applications, and their data. COM also provides the inter-component function call mechanism.
2. The System Integration Manager (SIM): The SIM package provides constructs and mechanisms for orchestrating composite systems of multiply integrated pieces.

Figure 1. - The COM package's relation to components described in the technical approach section.

The alpha version of the COM package and its documentation is currently available in the download area. It is nearly feature complete and fully functional. Currently, the only inter-component communication (ICC) implemented is direct memory addressing. This already allows for working systems of multiple parallel components, but development on the TCP/IP ICC is underway. Full users and developers guides will be made available as soon as they are released by IllinoisRocstar.

The SIM package is under development and will be available shortly. Examples of integrated systems will immediately follow.