The Alpaca project is developing high-level tools that help scientists design and maintain large, complex applications. The Alpaca tools will allow developers and end-users to examine and validate the correctness of an application, and aid them in measuring and improving its performance in production environments. Alpaca is based on the Cactus framework, and these tools are components themselves, built into the application and interacting with it. Alpaca's approach includes help to render applications tolerant against partial system failures, which is becoming a pressing need with tomorrow's architectures consisting of tens of thousands of nodes.

Alpaca is funded by the NSF SDCI programme for three years as award #0721915.

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Project Members

Current:

• Gabrielle Allen (co-PI)
• Eloisa Bentivegna (postdoc)
• Maciej Brodowicz (research staff)
• Oleg Korobkin (graduate student)
• Christian D. Ott (co-PI, faculty at Caltech)
• Christian Reisswig (postdoc at Caltech)
• Erik Schnetter (PI)
• Mayank Tyagi (co-PI)

Former:

• Junaid Ahmed (graduate student)
• Tyler Barker (undergraduate student)
• Tom Goodale (formerly co-PI)

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Publications

• CCT Technical Report CCT-TR-2008-2: project details.
• Poster (PDF, 5.8 MB) at the Building PetaScale Applications and Software Environments on TeraGrid workshop in Phoenix, AZ, in December 2007.
• Poster abstract (PDF, 40 kB) at the ICCS 2009 conference in Baton Rouge, LA, 2009.
• Poster (PDF, 40 kB) at the TeraGrid 2009 Conference in Arlington, VA, in June 2009.
• Paper preprint: Eloisa Bentivegna, Gabrielle Allen, Oleg Korobkin, and Erik Schnetter. Ensuring correctness at the application level: A software framework approach. Accepted for CBHPC (Component Based High Performance Computing) 2009, 2009
• Presentation (PDF, 3.7 MB) by Eloisa Bentivegna at the 2009 Workshop on Component-Based High Performance Computing (CBHPC 2009) in Portland, OR, November 2009.