A Proteus-Mediated Communications Substrate for LegionCCA and XCAT-C++

Component frameworks, including those supporting the Common Component Architecture (CCA), comprise the software infrastructure necessary for disjoint components to interact and coordinate to accomplish an application’s task. The CCA specification does not prescribe a wire format for inter-component calls in distributed frameworks, thereby promoting considerable flexibility and customization for the framework developer. This approach thus requires an additional specific strategy outside of the CCA to support interoperability between distributed frameworks. Mandating one common wire format, however, risks choosing the wrong format. This paper describes one solution to this problem, namely the use of a common, multiprotocol messaging layer within two disjoint framework implementations. The Proteus multi-protocol communication layer will allow the LegionCCA and XCAT-C++ CCA framework implementations to support component-based applications to span the two distributed frameworks. This paper describes working implementations of Proteus within both Legion and XCAT-C++, and outlines plans for full integration and communication interoperability.1