DCA: a distributed CCA framework based on MPI

The CCA is a component architecture for high-performance scientific applications. In this architecture components are parallel entities that are connected directly or in a distributed manner. The problem of communication between scientific parallel programs with differing numbers of processes is called the "M×N problem". This paper discusses problems and solutions regarding the M×N problem in the context of the CCA. We also present a prototype implementation of a distributed CCA framework with M×N capabilities. This implementation reuses many MPI concepts and constructions to build the parallel-remote port invocation mechanism. Leveraging MPI helps developers that are familiar with that communication library and benefits from its performance and high degree of scalability.