Treffer: A Reconfigurable Component-based Problem Solving Environment

Problem solving environments are an attractive approach to the integration of calculation and management tools for various applications. Scientific and engineering applications are becoming increasingly demanding in terms of both problem size and problem complexity and therefore benefit from the integrated problem solving approach. However such applications often require high performance computing components in order to be computationally feasible. It is therefore a challenge to construct integration technology, suitable for problem solving environments, that allows both flexibility as well as the embedding of parallel and high performance computing systems. Our DISCWorld system is designed to meet these needs and provides a Java-based middleware to integrate distributed computing component applications across wide-area networks. Our system supports both long running simulations as well as parameter-search style applications where many shorter “runs ” are used to explore the parameter space of a scientific or engineering model. Key features of our design are the ability to access remotely stored data; compose complex processing requests either graphically or through a scripting language; and execute components on heterogeneous and remote platforms. Operators in task graphs can be