Integration of PSEware Components

Integration of Projects

More important than the individual components of the PSEware project is their interaction and their integration. The PSEware project has benefited greatly from having multiple institutions involved in a single project, as opposed to having several individual grants. PSEware colleagues at other sites provide a built-in (some would say captive) "friendly user group", providing invaluable testing of portability, usability, and documentation. The range of expertise on the PSEware project has exceeded anything available at any single institution, ranging from active researchers in computer algebra systems to experts in high performance computing for physics applications. Developing multiple solution strategies for common problems, such as the module manager subsystem in the generic architecture above, has allowed us to generalize and abstract the approaches, creating tools with proven utility across a wide range of PSE situations.

Now that several components have been created and developed, the current phase of the work is to show how they fit together effectively. Some of the integration work currently going on includes:

Moving TechTalk to use Infospheres djinns, instead of straightforward Java. This Drexel/Caltech project will allow TechTalk components to save their state using Infospheres "freeze" capabilities.
Developing an interface between HPC++ and PAWS. This LANL/IU project will provide among other things a mechanism for the Hserver to interact directly with distributed objects in a computation.
Use of a computer algebra system for manipulating the chemical equations in the Airshed Modeler. This Drexel/UCI effort provides a utility not previously available in the Airshed modeler.
Use of Infospheres as a collaboration manager within the LSA PSE, and more generally as part of the PSE infrastructure developed along with the LSA. This is a joint Caltech/IU integration.

By the end of December 1997 we plan on having a major point solution, the Linear System Analyzer, using several of the technologies developed at other sites: the TechTalk system as a coordinator and to provide a shared Matlab window for interactions involving the sparse linear system, Infospheres as a collaboration manager for MUX/DEMUX on the shared GUI's, an Iris Explorer module with a Maple PDE manipulator and numerical discretizer as a front-end application problem generator. This system may also be imbedded as an object in the POOMA system, providing a wide range of solution strategies for implicit time-stepping algorithms.

A Generic PSE Architecture

Most of the PSEware projects (and many other PSEs) target a common software architecture, illustrated below:

Not all PSEware point solutions use all of those components, and some of them do not fit into the above structure because they are highly specialized. The PSEware project has developed multiple solutions for each of the components. For the collaboration subsystem, Infospheres and Java have been used. For the module manager, Iris Explorer, the HPC++ Hserver, scripting languages, and Java systems have been created.

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bramley@cs.indiana.edu

Last updated: Mon Jan 25 13:03:26 1999