The SciDAC Center for Technology for Advanced Scientific Computing Software (TASCS) focuses on developing tools, components and best practices for developing high quality, reusable high-performance computing software. TASCS fosters the Common Component Architecture (CCA) through a community forum that involves a wide range of participants. The CCA environment aims to bring component-based software development techniques and tools, which are commonplace in the computing industry, to high performance computing. To do so, several challenges are being addressed including parallelism, performance, and efficient handling of large datasets. The CCA has produced a specification that allows components to be deployed and reused in a highly extensible yet efficient parallel environment. The primary advantage of this component-based approach is the separate development of simulation algorithms, models, and infrastructure. This allows the pieces of a complex simulation to evolve independently, thereby helping a system grow intelligently as technologies mature. The CCA tools have been used to improve productivity and increase capabilities for HPC software in meshing, solvers, and computational chemistry, among other applications.

TASCS supports a range of core technologies for using components in high-performance simulation software, including the Caffeine framework, the Babel interoperability tool, and the Bocca development environment for HPC components. In addition, the CCA helps provide access to tools for performance analysis, for coupling parallel simulations, for mixing distributed and parallel computing, and for ensuring software quality in complex parallel simulations. These tools can help tame the complexity of utilizing parallel computation, especially for sophisticated applications that integrate multiple software packages, physical simulation regimes or solution techniques. We will discuss some of these tools and show how they have been used to solve HPC programming challenges.