GCF: a general coupling framework

Abstract

SUMMARYCoupled modelling is increasingly necessary to make progress in understanding the science of complex physical phenomena and a number of bespoke ('custom') coupled solutions to specific scientific challenges have emerged in recent years. These coupled models generally consist of some framework code in which individual models are embedded. The framework code promotes the required interoperation of the models to solve the larger problem being addressed. Bespoke solutions limit the ability of scientists to share models and to couple them together flexibly to produce (efficient) implementations to address new problems. This paper presents an approach, GCF, which addresses several of these limitations. Individual model sharing and flexibility in composition and deployment is achieved by imposing some lightweight development rules for single models and capturing information relating to the models themselves, to their composition into coupled models and to their deployment onto computational resources as machinereadable metadata. These metadata can be processed to support the generation of an implementation of the coupled model required by the developer. For example, lean and efficient framework code for the specific coupled model and deployment described by the developer can be generated. Alternatively, GCF-compliant models can be automatically adapted for use within other, existing frameworks. This paper presents the design and implementation of a bespoke framework generator to achieve the former, and the flexibility in the composition of GCF-compliant models is demonstrated.

Multiphysics simulations: challenges and opportunities.

“…Of course, many additional projects address important aspects of multiphysics simulations. Such projects include approaches that facilitate working at higher levels of abstraction (Ford et al, 2006;Sahu et al, 1999;McInnes et al, 2006;Bulatewicz and Cuny, 2006;DeVito et al, 2011), as well as software such as Cactus (Goodale et al, 2003), Coupler (Liu and Sosonkina, 2011), DDEMA (Michopoulos et al, 2003), FLASH (Dubey et al, 2009), InterComm (Sussman, 2006), Jade (Hegewald et al, 2008), Karma (Mahadevan et al, 2009), MCT (Larson et al, 2005), MUSE (Zwart et al, 2008), Overlink (Grandy, 2004), Overture (Hen-53 shaw, 2002), PreCICE , Sierra (Stewart and Edwards, 2004), and XpressSpace (Zhang et al, 2011a).…”

Coupling technologies for Earth System Modelling

“…The Bespoke Framework Generator (Ford et al, 2006;Armstrong et al, 2009) (BFG, www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/cnc/ projects/bfg) owes its development to an analysis of the Met Office future coupling requirements, the requirements of the GENIE paleoclimate coupled model (Armstrong et al, 2009, www.genie.ac.uk) and Community Integrated Assessment System (CIAS, www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/cias, Warren et al, 2008). BFG allows the user to choose the underlying coupling technology, taking coupling metadata as input and generating tailored (bespoke) wrapper code to be compiled and linked with the user's code and the chosen coupling library.…”

On-Line Chemistry Within WRF: Description and Evaluation of a State-of-the-Art Multiscale Air Quality and Weather Prediction Model

“…The current objectives are to maintain and support the OASIS3 coupler, continue the development of the OASIS4 coupler (see below), but also, through the organisation of workshops, help the community understand the different technical approaches used in code coupling, for example in the PALM coupler (Buis et al, 2006), in the UK Met Office FLUME project (Ford and Riley, 2003), in the US ESMF project (Killeen et al, 2006), and in the Bespoke Framework Generator (BFG) from U. of Manchester (Ford et al, 2006) used in the GENIE project. Currently OASIS3 is used for coupling between the COSMOS components (see section 2).…”