Domain Project

We are excited to announce that our paper, “A Model-Driven Platform for Software Applications on Heterogeneous Computing Environments”, has been accepted for presentation at the MDE4SA Workshop, part of the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) 2024.

The paper presents Domain, a model-driven software platform designed to support the development of efficient concurrent and distributed applications on heterogeneous computing systems. Leveraging the Actor Model as an architectural foundation and a shared intermediate representation (IR), Domain enables the integration of multiple domain-specific languages (DSLs) into a unified framework. Through this, software engineers can develop high-level models without dealing directly with low-level hardware complexity.

The core contribution lies in the separation of concerns among different stakeholders: application engineers, HPC experts, optimization specialists, and software architects collaborate through reusable assets such as model-to-model (M2M) and model-to-text (M2T) transformations. These assets allow high-level specifications to be automatically translated into optimized, hardware-specific binaries.

As a demonstration, the paper introduces QueryLanguage, a DSL for stream processing. Through Domain, an SQL-like query set is compiled into C code optimized for execution in a parallel runtime environment. The system, ActorStream, is evaluated using NYC Taxi Trip data and compared with Apache Spark. Results show improved performance in execution time and memory usage for several workloads.

This acceptance marks another step forward in our exploration of model-driven software engineering for heterogeneous systems, reinforcing the potential of DSLs and architectural modeling in high-performance computing.

We look forward to sharing our work with the community at MDE4SA 2024.