Towards Domain-specific Flow-based Languages

Due to the significant growth of the demand for data-intensive computing, in addition to the emergence of new parallel and distributed computing technologies, scientists and domain experts are leveraging languages specialized for their problem domain, i.e., domain-specific languages, to help them describe their problems and solutions, instead of using general purpose programming languages. The goal of these languages is to improve the productivity and efficiency of the development and simulation of concurrent scientific models and systems. Moreover, they help to expose parallelism and to specify the concurrency within a component or across different independent components. In this paper, we introduce the concept of domain-specific flow-based languages which allows domain experts to use flow-based languages adapted to a particular problem domain. Flow-based programming is used to support concurrency, while the domain-specific part of these languages is used to define atomic processes and domain-specific validation rules for composite processes. We propose a modeling language that can be used to develop such domain-specific languages. Since this language allows one to define other languages, we often refer to it as a meta-modeling language.