The Adaptive Code Kitchen: Flexible Tools for Dynamic Application Composition

Driven by the increasing componentization of scientific codes, the deployment of high-end system infrastructures such as the grid, and the desire to support high level problem solving primitives, application composition systems have become prevalent in computational science practice. We present the adaptive code kitchen which, as the name connotes, is a loose collection of capabilities to help realize complex adaptive composition scenarios. These include function interception, continuation modification, dynamic process checkpointing and rollback, and runtime recommendation. Using these broad primitives, a computational scientist can specify many 'recipes' of adaptivity as complete control systems around native object codes. Runtime systems support then enables loading and linking of native code components, monitoring of performance indicators, consulting a recommender system for algorithmic decisions, and dynamically updating application components in response to the recommendations. We present the architecture of the adaptive code kitchen and the key enabling technologies with brief mention of the applications that will be investigated henceforth during the course of the project.