Explaining StGermain: An aspect oriented environment for building extensible computational mechanics modeling software

HPC scientific computational models are notoriously difficult to develop, debug, and maintain. The reasons for this are multifaceted - including difficulty of parallel programming, the lack of standard frameworks, and the lack of software engineering skills in scientific software developers. In this paper we discuss the drivers, design and deployment of StGermain, a software framework that significantly simplifies the development of a spectrum of HPC computational mechanics models. The key distinction between StGermain and conventional approaches to developing computational models is that StGermain decomposes parallel scientific applications into a hierarchical architecture, supporting applications collectively built by a diverse community of scientists, modelers, computational scientists, and software engineers.