An Overview of the Common Component Architecture

Abstract

As the commercial software industry burgeoned, it was clear that increasingly complex software would require a mechanism scaling across people, geography and time. The answer came in the concept of software components. Software components are stand-alone modules that have a prescribed means for composition into an application. Component concepts enable, for example, MS Word documents to appear in MS Powerpoint slides, and has led to the point-and-click user interfaces that inhabit most desktop computers today. The idea of a component in software comes from its root word: "composeable". The process of connecting components together into an application can be likened to their electrical component analogue: hook transistors, diodes and resistors together one way, and you have a radio, another way and you have an MP3 player. The Common Component Architecture is a component model created by computational scientists from all of the DOE laboratories to establish a plug and play standard for high-performance computing. Recently the Common Component Architecture has been named on the Top 10 DOE Science Achievements in 2002 list (http://www.sc.doe.gov/sub/accomplishments/top_10.htm). Though computing has been synonymous with the DOE labs long before anyone dreamed of having a computer on their desktop, scientific computing high-performance scientific computing in particular has not benefitted from these advancements. This is because parallel computing, the mainstay of high performance computing, is not amenable to the component software existing in the commercial world. Parallel software requires a model that enables cooperation among thousands of individual processors, a situation not familiar to commercial software vendors. The Common Component Architecture was conceived to fill this gap.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA433599

Entities

People

  • David E. Bernholdt
  • Rob Armstrong
  • Teresa H. Ko

Organizations

  • Sandia National Laboratories

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Change Detection
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Vision
  • Computers
  • Detectors
  • Feature Extraction
  • High Performance Computing
  • Image Processing
  • Language
  • Networks
  • Parallel Computing
  • Sensor Networks
  • Standards
  • User Interface
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Integrated Circuit Design and Technology.
  • Software Engineering.