CCA Tutorials

Since January 2002, the CCA Forum Tutorial Working Group has been presenting tutorials on the Common Component Architecture to a variety of audiences. Tutorials are typically presented in conjunction with the quarterly CCA Forum meetings and elsewhere as opportunities arise. If you'd like to have a CCA tutorial at your meeting or conference, please let us know by emailing tutorial-wg@cca-forum.org.

The tutorial covers CCA concepts and software, and includes "live" examples, and in some cases hands-on experience for attendees. The tutorial has evolved over time, and you can access a complete archive of past presentations. If you haven't looked at the material in a while, it might be time to have another look!

Upcoming Tutorials

• Next Public Tutorial: Para08 (NTNU Campus, Trondheim, Norway, May 13, 2008). This tutorial presents a newly extended hands-on session including examples based on PDE solution and MPI use.
• The Common Component Architecture is one of fifteen tutorials on offer in conjunction with the SciDAC 2008 Conference this July in Seattle, Washington. Tutorials are Friday 18 July 2008. Advance registration is required. See the SciDAC Tutorials page for details.
• We will participate in the Ninth Workshop on the DOE Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection to be held 19-22 August 2008 in Berkeley, California. The date of our tutorial has not yet been fixed, but they are usually on the final Friday. Advance registration is required. DOE will sponsor travel expenses for a limited number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. See web site above for details.
• If you would like to have one for your conference, institution, or project, please let us know (tutorial-wg@cca-forum.org)!
• You can find out about upcoming tutorials (and much more) by subscribing to the main cca-forum mailing list, or inquire on the tutorial-wg@cca-forum.org mailing list.

Latest Source Materials

Please see the Tutorial Archives for copies of our presentations from all of our past tutorials.

We developed (and continue to improve) a set of "hands-on" exercises, for use in our tutorials and for individual study. Snapshots of these materials are archived with the tutorials where they were used, and the latest releases can be found here:

Hands-On Guide [Online HTML] [PDF] [HTML tarred/gzipped]

A written guide, taking you on a series of exercises in creating and using CCA components. [Complete archive: http://www.cca-forum.org/download/tutorial/]

tutorial-src-0.5.3_rc1.tar.gz

The complete source tree with all components and other files referred to in the Hands-On Guide. It provides the complete set of components used in the first exercise of the Guide and a reference for what things should look like after the remaining exercises are completed. [Complete archive: http://www.cca-forum.org/download/tutorial/]

cca-tools-0.6.4.tar.gz

This distribution the CCA toolchain includes the specific versions of the tools that work together appropriately for the source trees above. This distribution includes Ccaffeine and will download the appropriate versions of Babel and Chasm over the network and has been tested on a variety of Linux platforms. See the README or the appendix of the Hands-On Guide for installation instructions. [Complete archive: http://www.cca-forum.org/download/cca-tools/]

Ragib Hasan, of NCSA and the University of Illinois, has written an excellent How to Build a CCA Component from Scratch guide which provides some of the details not mentioned in the tutorial presentations.

People

There are quite a few people active in the Tutorial Working Group. Since we've intentionally reduced the number of different presenters at tutorials, you're even less likely to see them. So here they are...

People

Benjamin A. Allan, Rob Armstrong, David E. Bernholdt (chair), Randy Bramley, Tamara L. Dahlgren, Lori Freitag Diachin, Wael Elwasif, Tom Epperly, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Ragib Hasan, Dan Katz, Jim Kohl, Gary Kumfert, Lois Curfman McInnes, Alan Morris, Boyana Norris, Craig Rasmussen, Jaideep Ray, Sameer Shende, Torsten Wilde, Shujia Zhou

Institutions

Argonne National Laboratory, Binghamton University - State University of New York, Indiana University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA/Goddard, University of Illinois, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Oregon

And the Tutorial Working Group wishes to acknowledge the efforts of the numerous additional people who have worked very hard to make the Common Component Architecture what it is today. Without them, we wouldn't have anything to present tutorials about!

Feedback

Your feedback is appreciated. Please email tutorial-wg@cca-forum.org with questions or comments.