Introduction

SILOON (Scripting Interface Languages for Object-Oriented Numerics) gives scientists the ability to rapidly prototype and solve problems on high performance parallel computers. The SILOON project aims at bringing capabilities to the scientific programmer that are widely available to programmers in the business desktop market: visual programming, graphical interfaces, and drag-and-drop composition for rapid prototyping. SILOON provides toolkits and run-time support for building easy to use external interfaces to existing numerical codes. The developers hope to enable scientists and other application programmers to easily access existing object-oriented scientific frameworks and numerical libraries written in C, C++, and Fortran.

Programmers use scripting languages to glue together components with interpreted run-time scripts, allowing direct control over the starting and stopping of Unix processes. SILOON is a middleware package that may be used with the most popular scripting languages: Perl, TCL, and Python. It generates "glue code" to bind external library interfaces and provide run-time support and a computational server that is controllable under the scripting languages of choice. The first versions of SILOON were targeted for the POOMA and Overture frameworks.

As shown in the figure below, SILOON parses source code from existing object-oriented numerical class libraries and extracts information regarding the interfaces to functions and class methods. This information is then used to generate stub and skeleton code, which when compiled, provides the run-time support for linking user scripts with back-end computational engines.

Users

SILOON is currently being used by the developers and associated researchers to provide an easily modifiable interface to POOMA applications and codes written in C++. The developers hope to see many applications of SILOON in projects such as the Numerical Tokamak Turbulence Project, the Accelerator Physics Grand Challenge, and MC++ Monte-Carlo Neutronics.

Evaluation

SILOON has not been evaluated. However, you can submit your own evaluation of SILOON if you would like to.

Status

SILOON version 2.3 works on the following computer platforms:

• SGI IRIX 6.X
  • SGI C++ (7.2.1 or later)
  • GCC (2.95.2)
  • Kuck and Associates KCC compiler (v3.3c or later)
• Linux (x86, PPC)
  • GCC (2.95.2)
  • Kuck and Associates KCC compiler (v3.3c or later)

Documentation

• SILOON overview
• SILOON User's Guide

Developers

SILOON was developed at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory to facilitate the use of scripting languages with high performance parallel libraries and applications. Its principal developers were Peter Beckman, Craig Rasmussen and Reid Rivenburgh.