Techniques for wrapping scientific applications to CORBA components

This paper presents wrapping techniques that we have developed in order to integrate applications into the scientific workflow management system TENT. These techniques take into account the varying degrees of controllability found for each application and utilize various kinds of communication mechanisms between application and the associated wrapper. We also give an outline of the principles of component technology employed in the CORBA based TENT environment. In addition, the means by which applications can be connected through their associated wrappers and TENT components to form distributed workflows are presented. It is demonstrated how TENT provides the user with a homogeneous perspective on scientific workflows running in a distributed environment and how he is enabled to efficiently configure and control these workflows by means of the TENT component model.