Unified Component API: Supporting Standardized Middleware Integration and Flexible Interoperability in Cyberinfrastructure

Modern cyberinfrastructure supports an increasingly complex ecosystem of scientific workflows that span on-field sensors, edge computing devices, high-performance computing (HPC) centers, and hybrid cloud environments. Within the NSF ICICLE AI Institute, we are developing tools across project thrusts such as AI for Cyberinfrastructure (AI4CI) and Cyberinfrastructure for AI (CI4AI), guided by user-driven domains like digital agriculture and animal ecology to enable an edge-centric continuum. However, as these modules are developed by independent research groups in collaboration with domain scientists, they often lack interoperability within and across thrusts.To address these challenges, we propose a unified reference API framework as an initial step toward integrating these components into a cohesive system, starting with middleware tools developed within the AI4CI thrust. We present the design and implementation of the Unified Component API (UCA), which adopts a narrow waist architecture to unify Intelligent Middleware Technologies (IMT) components with standardized lifecycle management methods (\texttt{Start}, \texttt{Stop}, \texttt{Terminate}, and \texttt{Restart}), along with service invocations such as \texttt{InferenceService} using \texttt{HARPRuntimeInference} and \texttt{GPUDistributedInference}. This design enables plug-and-play integration tailored to specific execution scenarios. We demonstrate these capabilities through the Smart Scheduler, a modular component for AI-enhanced HPC job provisioning that orchestrates auxiliary tools such as workload profilers, data generators, and estimators. Our results show how UCA simplifies user interactions and supports rapid development and testing of alternative implementations, enabling extensible and scalable cyberinfrastructure systems across diverse scientific domains.