A Suite of Domain-Specific Visual Languages For Scientific Software Application Modelling

Many advances in science now require sophisticated scientific software applications that facilitate data and computationally intensive experiments. However, the effective utilization of existing computational power e.g., grid and cloud platforms depends on the capabilities of scientists to implement parallel, scalable code for such experiments. Currently, tools aimed at supporting scientists are either very limited to specific domains, or require significant development using low-level code. We describe our work towards a more end user-friendly scientific applications development process, notations and toolset. We introduce a scientific application designer intended for use primarily by scientists to enable them in describing workflow, processes, entities, formulae, computation and ultimately realization code for different computing platforms. This is achieved via a set of integrated, domain-specific visual and textual languages (DSVLs). A web-based modeling tool supports definition of new DSVLs and modeling of these applications. We are currently extending our tool to support generation of multi-core and GPU implementations, and visualization of results.