Approaching computational infrastructures from a distributed object-oriented angle

In the field of agricultural and environmental research the ubiquitous availability of large quantities of computing power (e.g. HPC clusters) enables scientists to create more complex models and systems as well as apply those to increasingly large regions, countries or even continents. In this context new problems arise. The actual scientific application of models depends increasingly on custom tailored scripts and software created by dedicated computer science personal or similarly skilled scientists. Unfortunately, this situation does not reflect the available resources in many scientific institutions. We will present an approach we currently pursue at ZALF which tries to enable scientific users to handle a larger set of use cases themselves. Our goal is to create something one could call a capability secure distributed object-oriented infrastructure layer based on a set of Cap’n Proto schemas. Implementing these schemas enables us to describe the different stages of computational infrastructure use – from data and computational resource acquisition to model application and result processing to visualization. From a high-level view this layer will act like a distributed object-oriented program. The computer science staff will be able to incrementally extend it to fulfil new needs and due to its capability secure heritage allow secure sharing of resources (called capabilities) amongst its users. With the creation of visual interfaces on top of the infrastructure layer also less tech-savvy scientists will be able to solve their problems. Thus, our goal will be reached once we can put some of the available computational power and resources back into scientists’ hands.