Parallel components for PDEs and optimization: some issues and experiences

High-performance simulations in computational science often involve the combined software contributions of multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. One goal of component-based software engineering in large-scale scientific simulations is to help manage such complexity by enabling better interoperability among codes developed by different groups. This paper discusses recent work on building component interfaces and implementations in parallel numerical toolkits for mesh manipulations, discretization, linear algebra, and optimization. We consider several motivating applications involving partial differential equations and unconstrained minimization to demonstrate this approach and evaluate performance.