The Alpaca project is developing high-level tools that help scientists develop and maintain large, complex applications. The Alpaca tools will allow developers and end-users to examine and validate the correctness of an application, and aid them in measuring and improving its performance in production environments. Alpaca is based on the Cactus framework, and these tools are components themselves, built into the application and interacting with it. Alpaca's approach includes help to render applications tolerant against partial system failures, which is becoming a pressing need with tomorrow's architectures consisting of tens of thousands of nodes.

Alpaca is funded by the NSF SDCI programme for three years as award #0721915. A report outlining the Alpaca project in more detail is available as CCT Technical Report CCT-TR-2008-2. We also presented a poster (PDF, 5.8 MB) at the Building PetaScale Applications and Software Environments on TeraGrid workshop in Phoenix, AZ, in December 2007.

Project Members

Current:
   Gabrielle Allen (co-PI)
   Eloisa Bentivegna (postdoc)
   Maciej Brodowicz (research staff)
   Oleg Korobkin (graduate student)
   Christian D. Ott (co-PI)
   Christian Reisswig (graduate student at AEI)
   Erik Schnetter (PI)
   Mayank Tyagi (co-PI)

Former:
   Junaid Ahmed (graduate student)
   Tyler Barker (undergraduate student)
   Tom Goodale (co-PI)