With the growing availability of heterogeneous networks of computing systems, multidisciplinary applications (MDAs) are becoming increasingly tractable. Such applications combine a number of programs representing different "disciplines" into a coherent, integrated system of interacting processes. In this paper we study the characteristics of MDAs and derive a corresponding set of language requirements, focusing on modular system design and multi-level parallelism. In addition to providing a brief overview of a number of languages addressing various aspects of the problem, we present a detailed overview of the Opus language, which was specifically designed with the goal of supporting the requirements of MDAs.

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