Arches: an infrastructure for PSE development

In this paper, we describe Arches, an object-oriented framework for building domain-specific PSEs. The framework was designed to support a wide range of problem domains and to be extendable in a way that allows it to target very different high-performance computing models. To demonstrate this flexibility we describe two PSEs that have been developed from the same framework yet solve different problems and target very different computing platforms. The Coven PSE supports parallel applications that need the large-scale parallelism that is found in cost-effective Beowulf clusters. In contrast, the RCADE PSE targets reconfigurable computing (FPGA-based) platforms with fine-grain parallelism. RCADE was designed to aid NASA Earth scientists interested in studying satellite instrument data and who are unlikely to be schooled in low-level hardware design.