XCAT C++: High Performance CCA Implementation Home Page

XCAT-C++ is a high performance distributed CCA framework. It is designed to enable the composition of distributed applications using a component based plug-n-play model.

[Introduction ] [ Features ] [ Release Schedules ] [ User Guide ] [ Download ] [ Code-generator Tutorial ] [Students] [Bug Reports ] [Contact Information]

Introduction

A consortium of university and national laboratory researchers launched the CCA Forum in 1998, to develop a Common Component Architecture (CCA) specification for large scale scientific computation. The specification is designed from the perspective of the required behavior of software components. However, the design and implementation of the framework, choice of communication protocol, and component hosting mechanisms have not been formally specified. This has facilitated different research groups to design, develop and evaluate the use of the same CCA specification to support a wide variety of applications. XCAT-C++ is an implementation of the CCA specification tailored to the needs of high performance distributed scientific applications.

Features

XCAT-C++ provides a suite of tools for application and component developers to leverage the efficacy of the CCA component model to design, develop and execute large scale scientific applications. Some of the important features of XCAT-C++ include:

High Performance: The overhead due to the component layering is minimal.
Component Interactions: XCAT-C++ framework uses the high performance Proteus multi-protocol communication library.
User Interface: A flexible and powerful python scripting interface allows the creation, connection and invocation of a distributed application that consists of a network of components.
Code Generation: A flexible code generator tools automates the generation of the required stubs and skeletons for XCAT-C++ components. The interface to a component (port descriptions) can be provided either as a C++ header file or as a Web Service Description Language (WSDL) document.

Release Schedules

XCAT-C++ Core Framework 1.0Beta: Sept 1st, 2008
XCAT-C++ Code Generator 1.0Beta: expected, Dece 31st, 2008

User Guide

Here is a userguide for XCAT-C++.

Code Generator Tutorial

A tutorial on the use of the code generation to to help simplify the process of developing XCAT-C++ components will be available soon.

Download

XCAT-C++ Framework and samples : This tarball provides the source code for XCAT-C++ framework along with sample components.

To use the scripting front-end of XCAT-C++, SWIG 1.3.127 and Python 2.4 are needed. XCAT-C++ also uses xerces 2.3. You can download these from the distribution sites for these technologies or download a taraball with all these technologies packaged in a single tarball named deps.tar.tg. These three packages are also available in most linux installations. If you already have the required versions, then you don't need to download the "deps" tarball.

SWIG 1.3.27, Python 2.4 and Xerces 2.3 : Dependencies for XCAT-C++.

Untar the deps.tar.gz tarball, inside the xcatcpp-1.0Beta.tar.gz directory. So, your directory structure should be the following after you download and untar:

xcatcpp-1.0Beta
xcatcpp-1.0Beta/xcatcpp/
xcatcpp-1.0Beta/deps

XCAT-C++ Students

Current Students

Michael R. Head
Xiang Gao (supervised by Ken Chiu)

Reporting Bugs and Problems

Please email Madhusudhan Govindaraju <mgovinda at cs dot binghamton dot edu> and Michael R. Head < head at acm dot org> with bugs, errors and problems while using XCAT-C++.

Contact Information

If you wish to contribute, collaborate or use XCAT-C++, please contact Madhusudhan Govindaraju <mgovinda at cs dot binghamton dot edu>