An aspect oriented framework for scientific component development

Aspect-oriented programming enables developers to capture in separated aspect modules concerns that are spread over different components in a system. This paper is an attempt to apply this paradigm to high performance computing. Besides achieving the usual advantages of improved modularity, more reusable code that is easier to develop and maintain, we pursue to improve efficiency by means of dynamic changes of aspects at runtime. We present an aspect-oriented framework where scientific components and aspects are first-order entities (components) which interaction is established by means of what we have called aspect connectors. As an example, we focus on the communication aspect, which encapsulates the communication scheme among the set of components that set up a system. The expressiveness and suitability of the approach are shown by means of an application example.