Using the Common Component Architecture to Design High Performance Scientific Simulation Codes

We present a design and proof-of-concept implementation of a component-based scientific simulation toolkit for hydrodynamics. We employed the Common Component Architecture, a minimalist, low-latency component model as our paradigm for developing a set of high-performance parallel components for simulating flows on structured adaptively refined meshes. Our findings demonstrate that the architecture is sufficiently flexible and simple to allow an intuitive and straightforward decomposition of a complex monolithic code into easy-to-implement components. The result is a set of stand-alone independent components from which a simulation code is assembled. Our results show that the component architecture imposes negligible overheads on single processor performance while scaling to multiple processors remains unaffected.