MARS: Runtime Support for Coordinated Application

Abstract

Expert knowledge from many disciplines is frequently embodied in stand-alone codes used to solve particular problems. Codes from various disciplines can be composed into cooperative ensembles that can answer questions larger than any solitary code can. These multi-code compositions are called multidisciplinary applications and are a growing area of research. To support the integration of existing codes into multidisciplinary applications, we have constructed the Multidisciplinary Application Runtime System (MARS). MARS supports legacy modules, heterogeneous execution environments, conditional execution flows, dynamic module invocation and realignment, runtime binding of output data paths, and a simple specification language to script module actions.