Authors

Abstract

Modeling and simulation in many science and engineering domains often involves the executionand/or iteration of a sequence of applications, with data transfer between applications typicallyrequired. These applications often do not have a formal application programming interface(API). Instead, executing an application requires first writing a text-based input file, the formatof which is typically defined in a users manual. While text-based input files are suitablefor simple one-off calculations, they can become cumbersome if a user wants to execute theapplications multiple times and systematically vary input parameters, especially when a complexworkflow is involved. In this case, they must resort to either manually making changes in theinput file or developing their own script that modifies the input file and executes the application.Depending on the format of the input file, writing such a script can be a non-trivial anderror-prone task.