Development of Scientific Applications with High-Performance Computing through a Component-Based and Aspect-Oriented Methodology

Scientific researchers face critical challenges which require an increased role of High-Performance Computing (HPC). In many cases, these users, who are specialists in their fields of action, have no previous training or the required skills to face them, or just want to compile and run their programming codes as soon as possible. Sometimes this leads to the risk of being counterproductive in terms of efficiency, because after all, researchers may have to wait longer for the final result, due to a wrong programming model, wrong software architecture, or even errors in the parallelization of sequential code. However, there is a clear lack of approaches with specific methodologies or optimal working environments for the development of specific HPC software systems. Moreover, although there are several frameworks based on Aspect-Oriented and Component-Based Programming for supercomputing, they are focused on the design and implementation phases, while none is based on the reuse of components from the earliest stages of the development, which are defined in the Requirements Engineering. The aim of this proposal is to provide new solutions for the open challenges in high-performance computing, through a methodology and a new framework based on aspect-oriented components for the development of scientific applications for HPC environments. The objective is to allow researchers and users to create their HPC programs in a more efficient way, with greater reliance on their functionality and achieving a reduction of time, effort and cost in the processes of development and maintenance, through the reuse of components (with already developed and tested parallel source codes) from the earliest stages of the development.