Collaborative Research: Conceptualizing an Institute for Using Inter-Domain Abstractions to Support Inter-Disciplinary Applications

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This grant is a planning grant to fund the conceptualization of an institute for software infrastructure for sustained innovation. It funds the planning of the technical and organizational aspects. To understand community requirements, it involves workshops and outreach to gather community requirements. To fully understand the behavior of a complex physical phenomenon such as a burning building, it is often necessary to understand both large-scale effects such as the buildup of heat on each floor, and small-scale effects, such as how a steal beam in the foundation deforms as it gets hotter. Computational simulations that study such effects in tandem are called "multi-scale" simulations, and are exceedingly difficult to write. This is because the computational models that represent the different scales differ widely, and the software components used to simulate each scale are often incompatible. Combining these disparate components requires painstaking and error prone programmer labor. This project will conceptualize an institute devoted to providing solutions to scientists investigating multi-scale problems. The project centers around reaching out to computational scientists and computer systems researchers to determine both what kinds of programming abstractions may be useful for different computational models and how to best adapt existing abstractions to the challenges of multi-scale simulation. The goal is to enable the establishment of an institute that will study the use of various programming abstractions to bridge the gap between differing software components, hence easing the pain of writing multi-scale simulations. The ultimate effect will be to allow multi-scale systems to be simulated accurately and efficiently, providing deeper insights into the behavior of complex physical systems.