It turns out that this project has some strong similarities to a research
project at UC Irvine on Software Architecture called Chiron-2 (C2).
Basically, C2 is a component and message based architectural style for
component reuse and flexible system composition. It has computational
components which issue messages to connectors (software buses), which then
forward the messages along to other components connected to the bus.
Differences are that the components may or may not be distributed, so the
style can be used to create typical single binary applications, or they can
be used to make widely distributed applications. Ideally, the same
architecture can be mapped to multiple instantiations, both distributed,
not distributed, or mixed. C2 also makes use of implicit invocation, where
a computation is started due to a notification of a change in state of
another component, rather than a message which directly names an entry
point. Another significant difference is that the systems are aimed at
different research communities: C2, the software architecture community,
Infospheres, the high-performance computing area.
For more information, and electronic access to publications on C2 (incuding
our recent IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering article), see web page:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/arch/
- Jim