Scientific Computing Research Environments for the Mathematical Sciences

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Under the SCREMS program, the Department of Mathematicsat the College of William & Mary will purchase equipmentfor the creation of a computing network dedicated to thesupport of research in the mathematical sciences. Theaward will provide funds for high-bandwidth networkingequipment, high-performance computers for numericalcalculations, and a file server. This equipment, togetherwith desktop machines providing platforms for smallercomputations, will provide a numerical/file server clusterfor the faculty investigators and students working on anumber of research projects. This equipment will be usedfor computationally intensive research projects spanninga wide range of applied mathematics. These includenumerical methods for engineering design, numericalmathematics, computational biochemistry, and operationsresearch. The projects specifically included in the grantare: (1) Efficient approaches to the optimization of systemsgoverned by partial differential equations, (2) distanceparameterized methods for molecular conformation, (3) aparallel Hessenberg QR eigenvalue algorithm, and (4) thecalculation of the exact distribution of the time totraverse a stochastic activity network and the eliminationof resampling error in bootstrapping. PI Leemis and two former doctoral students have writtenAPPL (A Probability Programming Language). This Maple-basedlanguage is used to compute probabilities and performoperations on random variables. The size of many problemsthat can be solved by APPL is limited by computing speed.The speed offered by the hardware obtained as part of theSCREMS grant is crucial to solving problems of the magnitudeencountered in practice.