Berkeley Lab will host a one-day tutorial on the Common Component Architecture from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 6, in the Bldg. 50 auditorium. There is no fee for the workshop, but advance registration is required. To register, go to http://acts.nersc.gov/workshop/CCATutorial/.

CCA is a project to develop a common framework that will allow scientists to reuse "legacy" computer codes on today's high-performance computing systems, and to allow interoperability between those codes. Started about five years ago, CCA shifted into high gear last year under DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which funded the Center for Component Technology for Terascale Simulation Software (CCTTSS) to address problems of complexity, reuse, and interoperability for scientific simulation software. The tutorial will discuss CCA at both conceptual and practical levels.

Here's some background: Components are software objects that encapsulate useful functionality and interact with other components only through well-defined interfaces. Component-based approaches to software development, including the CCA, provide a means to manage the complexity of large-scale software applications and facilitate the reuse and interoperability of code. The component concept is widely used in the commercial/business world (e.g., CORBA, COM, and Enterprise JavaBeans) and is popular in visualization as well (e.g., AVS and Data Explorer), but none of these environments is well suited to use in HPC environments. The CCA was designed specifically with the needs of high-performance scientific computing in mind, including the existence of large body of existing code that cannot easily be rewritten. The tutorial will cover the concepts of components and the CCA in particular; the tools provided by the CCA environment, including the Babel system for language interoperability; the creation of CCA-compatible components; and their use in scientific applications.

The one-day tutorial will be offered as a parallel session to the DOE ACTS Collection Workshop being conducted by Osni Marques and Tony Drummond of the Scientific Computing Group in the Computational Research Division. For more information on this tutorial contact: acts-workshop@nersc.gov.