Component Specification for Parallel Coupling Infrastructure

Coupled systems comprise multiple interacting subsystems and are an increasingly common computational science application, most notably as multiscale and multiphysics models. Parallel computing and, in particular, message-passing programming have enabled the development of these models but also present a parallel coupling problem (PCP) in the form of intermodel data dependencies. Component-based software engineering has been proposed as one means of conquering software complexity in scientific applications; and given the compound nature of coupled models, it is a natural approach to addressing the PCP. We define a software component specification for solving the PCP, abstracting the elements of the PCP and mapping them onto a set of components from the Common Component Architecture. We discuss a reference implementation based on the Model Coupling Toolkit. We demonstrate how these components might be deployed to solve coupling problems in climate modeling.