Improving scalability and maintenance of software for high-performance scientific computing by combining MDE and frameworks

Abstract

In recent years, numerical simulation has attracted increasing interest within industry and among academics. Paradoxically, the development and maintenance of high performance scientific computing software has become more complex due to the diversification of hardware architectures and their related programming languages and libraries. In this paper, we share our experience in using model-driven development for numerical simulation software. Our approach called MDE4HPC proposes to tackle development complexity by using a domain specific modeling language to describe abstract views of the software. We present and analyse the results obtained with its implementation when deriving this abstract model to target Arcane, a development framework for 2D and 3D numerical simulation software. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.