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XCAT is the Indiana University, Extreme Lab implementation of the Common Component Architecture (CCA). It supercedes our earlier effort called CCAT. The CCA specification describes the construction of portable software components that may be re-used in any CCA compliant runtime frameworks. It is expected that the CCA group will build frameworks that are tuned for a variety of application environments. Some cases are designed for applications that run on massively parallel computers. In these cases components may be parallel objects (multiple component instances operating in synchrony and communicating with each other with MPI) or they may be highly multi-threaded and run on large shared memory, multiprocessor servers. In other cases, the frameworks are designed to support applications built from components that are distributed over a wide-area Grid of resources and distributed services. The Indiana implementation is a framework for such a case. It is based on Globus (and CoG) for its core security and remote task creation, and it uses RMI over XSOAP for its communication.

A brief (although outdated) technical overview of the CCA component specification is given here. This includes the standard CCA interfaces and a description of their semantics.

Publications

• Checkpoint and Restart for Distributed Components in XCAT3. Sriram Krishnan, and Dennis Gannon. Accepted for publication to Grid 2004, 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing, Nov 2004.
• On Building Parallel and Grid Applications: Component Technology and Distributed Services. Dennis Gannon, Sriram Krishnan, Liang Fang, Gopi Kandaswamy, Yogesh Simmhan, and Aleksander Slominski. Proceedings of CLADE 2004, Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments. June 2004.
• XCAT3: A Framework for CCA Components as OGSA Services. Sriram Krishnan, and Dennis Gannon. Proceedings of HIPS 2004, 9th International Workshop on High-Level Parallel Programming Models and Supportive Environments. April 2004.
• Merging the CCA Component Model with the OGSI Framework. Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Sriram Krishnan, Kenneth Chiu, Aleksander Slominski, Dennis Gannon, and Randall Bramley. Proceedings of CCGrid2003, 3rd International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid. May 2003.
• Grid Web Services and Application Factories. Dennis Gannon, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Sriram Krishnan, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Lavanya Ramakrishnan, and Aleksander Slominski. Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, Chapter 9. Nov 2002. (Also see the Application Factory page)
• An Authorization Framework for a Grid Based Common Component Architecture. Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Helen Nell Rehn, Jay Alameda, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Aleksander Slominski, Kay Connelly, Von Welch, Dennis Gannon, Randall Bramley, and Shawn Hampton. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Grid Computing, Nov 2002.
• Programming the Grid: Distributed Software Components, P2P and Grid Web Services for Scientific Applications. Dennis Gannon, et al. In Special Issue on Grid Computing, Journal of Cluster Computing, July 2002.
• XCAT 2.0: A Component-Based Programming Model for Grid Web Services. Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Sriram Krishnan, Kenneth Chiu, Aleksander Slominski, Dennis Gannon, and Randall Bramley. Technical Report-TR562, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University. Jun 2002.

• XCAT3: A Framework for CCA Components as OGSA Services [PowerPoint Slides 200KB]. HIPS 2004, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2004.
• The Common Component Architecture (CCA) and XCAT [PowerPoint Slides 1MB]. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. March 2003.
• Programming the Grid with Components [PowerPoint Slides 150KB]. Tutorial at the Joint ACM Java Grande-ISCOPE 2002 Conference. Nov 2002.