Babel Middleware

Infobox Software
name = Babel



caption =
author =
developer = LLNL
released =
latest release version = 1.2.0
latest release date = November 2008
operating system = cross-platform
genre = middleware
license = LGPL
website = [http://www.llnl.gov/casc/components Babel Home]

Babel is an open source middleware system serving the scientific computing community.As language interoperability tool, Babel enables arbitrary mixing of software
libraries written in C/C++,
Fortran, Python, and Java [ [https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/components/docs/users_guide.pdf Babel Users' Guide] ] As distributed computing platform, Babel provides a language-neutralRemote Method Invocation (RMI) scheme similar to Java RMIthat allows third-party plug-ins to specify custom data encodings andnetwork protocols [ [http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370222 Babel RMI paper at IPDPS '07] ] .

How it works

Babel requires developers to use an interface description language to specify the platform and language neutral interface to code. Babel uses a custom dialect called SIDL (Scientific Interface Definition Language), which has adaptations specific to computational science and engineering applications.The Babel tool parses the SIDL specification to generate source code which provides the glue between programming languages.

Babel works on all known POSIX and Unix variants, including Linux, Mac OS X,
AIX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, Cray's XT4, IBM's BlueGene, and many commodity clusters. Babel does not require special compiler or linkertechnology and works with GNU, Intel, IBM, PathScale, PGI, and many other compilers. Babel is distributed under an LGPL license.

Impact

Babel won an R&D 100 award in 2006 [ [http://www.rdmag.com/rd100ach/RD100SearchResults.aspx?strProduct=Babel&Type=P R&D 100 Award Archive] ] [ [https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-07-01p.html LLNL Public Affairs Archive] ] .It has been used in diverse computational applications such as accelerator beam dynamics, cell biology, chemistry, climate, electron effects, fusion, geomagnetics, materials, nuclear power plants, radio astronomy, and subsurface transport as well as infrastructure such as frameworks, meshing, solvers, sparse linear algebra, and sourcecoderefactoring [ [http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1742-6596/46/1/066/jpconf6_46_066.pdf | CCA Impact paper at SciDAC 06] ] . Babel is also redistributed with some customer applications, the CCA framework, and [http://packages.debian.org/lenny/babel-1.2.0 Debian Linux] .

History

Babel was started as an internal research project on software components at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999.The first public (alpha) release of Babel was in 2001.Also in 2001 it secured funding from SciDAC (Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing)along with its collaborators in the [http://www.cca-forum.org | CCA Forum (Common Component Architecture Forum)] .

Community

Babel development and maintenance is currently funded by United States Department of Energy, but relies heavily on an open source community. Contributors hail from Sandia National Laboratories,
Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, [http://www.txcorp.com Tech-X Corp] ,
MIT, University of Utah, and more. The Babel development team maintain open software repositories, [https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/components/resources.html mailing lists] , and [http://www.cca-forum.org/bugs/babel issue trackers] .

References

ee Also

*CORBA
*COM
*SWIG

External links

* [http://www.llnl.gov/casc/components Babel home page]
* [http://www.cca-forum.org CCA Forum home page]
* [http://www.scidac.org SciDAC home page]