DeCo: a declarative coordination framework for scientific model federations

D. Herington, D. Stotts
18th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings.  
Program federation is assembling a software system from cooperating but independent application programs. We present DeCo, a declarative approach to creating and coordinating federations, and discuss its application in the domain of scientific computing. Manual programming is the current norm for creating model federations; in one example we studied, 80,000 lines of Unix scripts were manually generated to federate five weather simulation models into a system that can produce a 12-hour forecast
more » ... n under 12 hours. DeCo is meant to automate several aspects of this currently manual process. Participating programs and data files are described formally. The expression of a compound execution, a federation, is given in the functional language Haskell, extended with operations for large-grain program description and coordination. The declarative expression of a federation in terms of data flow among the component programs captures synchronization requirements implicitly and exploits the inherent concurrency automatically. Haskell compilation, notably its rigorous type checking, ensures the consistency of the federation. Operation of the coordination framework is demonstrated on a federation of Fortran programs that simulate environmental processes in the Neuse River estuary of North Carolina.
doi:10.1109/ase.2003.1240295 dblp:conf/kbse/HeringtonS03 fatcat:bq62chvfvja5tgtkwjhzuyabrm