Dynamic reconfiguration of scientific components using aspect oriented programming: a case study

This paper is a case study on the use of a high-level, aspect-oriented programming technology for the modelling of the communication and interaction scheme that affects the set of components of a parallel scientific application Such an application uses domain decomposition methods and static grid adaptation techniques in order to obtain the numerical solution of a reaction-diffusion problem modelled as a system of two time-dependent, non-linearly coupled partial differential equations Besides achieving the usual advantages in terms of modularity and reusability, we aim to improve the efficiency by means of dynamic changes of aspects at runtime The application design considers two types of components as first-order entities: Scientific Components (SCs) for the computational tasks and Communication Aspect Components (CACs) for dynamic management of the communication among SCs The experiments show the suitability of the proposal as well as the performance benefits obtained by readjusting the communication aspect.