Programming Environments for Scientific Computation

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Programming supercomputers is currently difficult and time consuming. Scientists and engineers who use these machines have an urgent need for a programming environment that is portable, interactive, flexible, and convenient. There is a prototype that serves as an existence proof for the feasibility of constructing a useful environment for scientific computing. This software tool, called CLAMth (the Computatinal Linear Algebra Machine), currently exists as a prototype version written in Fortran 77. Although CLAM is successful, we view it as a "first generation" programming environment for supercomputers. Using a modern programming language (T), we propose to build a "second generation" environment that will: oAccept the programmer's preferred language, be it T, CLAM, or Fortran. oHave an interpretive debugger that will promote fast prototyping. oBe fully portable from workstation to mainframe to supercomputer. oUtilize state-of-the-art algorithms for large scale numerical analysis tasks. It will handle vector and matrix data structures automatically and also contain an "expert" capability to select appropriate algorithms from its own internal library to match the solution techniques to the problem size and characteristics. In short, this environment will provide the applications- oriented engineer or scientists with the fastest possible solution for any particular computation, without requiring the user to make decisions about the appropriate algorithms and data structures to be employed. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This proposal focuses on the development of programming tools for scientists and engineers. Specifically the proposal refines the programming language associated with CLAM, a previously developed software package, for improved programming environments. This new version of CLAM will have several improvements such a portability, automatic parallelization, etc. and can be easily incorporated into code generated by other languages. Thus 36 month proposal will be funded all at one time as follows: $150.0k CSE (CISE) $ 50.0k Comp. Math (DMS) $ 50.0k New Tech (DASC) --------- $250.0k 36 mos. paid entirely in first year. ***