Mathematical Sciences: Object Oriented Software Design for Optimization and Inverse Problems

研究人员和他的同事的目标是通过进一步开发Hilbert类库（一个用c++编写的面向对象编程环境），弥合用于数值优化的“现成”软件包与科学和工程中的复杂应用之间的巨大差距。这种编程方法根据其自然抽象组件（向量加法、内积等）来表达优化算法，而不会对数据结构和表示施加不必要的约束。另一方面，应用软件可以使用最合适的数据结构、算法和语言（例如Fortran的各种方言）来编写。编程环境在通用优化代码和特定于应用程序的代码之间提供了一个灵活的、很大程度上是自动的接口。除了详细阐述基本类库之外，本提案的目标还包括实现几种用于大规模优化的现代算法，设计一个软件工具包，使应用程序程序员和数值优化器能够轻松访问HCL编程环境，并对各种现实问题进行测试。例如，地震数据处理方法的研究为该项目提供了最初的动力，并且仍然是主要目标。软件的重用是软件工程研究的一个长期目标，因为软件开发和维护代表了计算成本的大部分。面向对象编程指定了一种将可重用性提升到指导原则地位的软件设计方法。传统的（“过程式”）编程风格将数据和算法的内部细节嵌入到程序部分之间的接口中。面向对象编程隐藏或封装了这些细节，这使得程序部件可以相当容易地交换。由于这样或那样的原因，面向对象已经成为商业编程的主要方法，尤其是图形应用程序。到目前为止，它还没有对科学计算产生太大的影响，因为科学计算同样需要可重用的软件。许多科学家不使用可免费获得的高质量数值程序，仅仅是因为编写这些程序的程序风格使它们与计算机辅助设计与制造、材料科学和生物技术等领域的自然数据表示不兼容。一个面向对象的基础科学计算框架，正如这里所提出的，可以大大增强数值分析人员和其他科学家之间的软件交换，从而提高计算研究的效率。

Symes 9627355 The investigator and his colleague aim to bridge the often large gap between ``off-the-shelf'' software packages for numerical optimization, on the one hand, and complex applications in science and engineering, on the other, through further development of the Hilbert Class Library, an object-oriented programming environment written in C++. This approach to programming expresses optimization algorithms in terms of their natural abstract components (vector addition, inner product, and so forth), without imposing unnecessary constraints on data structure and representation. Application software, on the other hand, can be written using the most suitable data structures, algorithms, and languages (various dialects of Fortran, for instance). The programming environment provides a flexible and largely automatic interface between the generic optimization code and the application-specific code. In addition to the elaboration of the basic class library, objectives of this proposal include the implementation of several modern algorithms for large-scale optimization, the design of a software toolkit that allows application programmers and numerical optimizers easy access to the HCL programming environment, and testing on a variety of realistic problems. For example, research in seismic data processing methods provided the original motivation for this project, and remains a principal target. Reuse of software is a long-standing goal of software engineering research, as software development and maintenance represents the bulk of the cost of computation. Object oriented programming designates an approach to software design that elevates reusability to the status of guiding principle. Traditional ("procedural") programming style embeds the internal details of data and algorithms in the interfaces between program parts. Object oriented programming hides or encapsulates these details, which permits program parts to be interchanged with considerably great er ease. For this and other reasons, object orientation has become the dominant methodology in commercial programming, especially for graphics applications. It has not up to now had much impact on scientific computation, which has an equally great need for reusable software. Many scientists do not use freely available high quality numerical programs, simply because the procedural style in which these programs are written makes them incompatible with natural data representations in such fields as computer aided design and manufacturing, materials science, and biotechnology. An object oriented framework for basic scientific computations, as proposed here, could lead to greatly enhanced interchange of software between numerical analysts and other scientists, and so improve the efficiency of computational research.