a schema based paradigm for facile description and control of amulti-component parallel, coupled atmosphere-ocean model
Multidisciplinary Earth System science applications involve coupling interacting components over differing time scales and varying spatial locations. Each individual Earth System model component is, in itself, a complex high-performance application that involves considerable user expertise in setting up both at build-time and at runtime. The added complexity of running in a coupled fashion presents domain science experts with additional hurdles as they end up handling the configuration of codes they are not intimately familiar with. Seeing the need to free the domain scientists from a lot of this complexity at the programming level and encourage interdisciplinary code development, component frameworks (e.g. ESMF, CCA) have emerged over the past few years with considerable success. But in order to facilitate the build and runtime configuration of the existing and emerging coupled component applications we need to extend the individual component definitions beyond interface syntax to an encapsulation of the build- and runtime configurations and augment that with the respective coupler component configuration. We have previously successfully employed an XML Schema based language to comprehensively describe modifiable build- and runtime options of complex ocean modeling systems. In this paper we examine extending our approach to cover a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. The result is that we can present the end-user with an automatically generated, semantically rich and validating, GUI to setup and run the coupled system in parallel on different architectures and in the future on Grid systems as well. This paradigm allows scientists using the coupled model to more rapidly comprehend a coupled system, avoid technical and physical configuration errors and concentrate more on coupled model results and analysis.
components encapsulation xml gui metadata