Linear System Analyzer Users

The LSA has been developed with three distinct groups of users in mind:

Numerical linear algebra researchers. These users are the experts in the areas covered by the LSA, and would use it for rapid prototyping of solution strategies.
Application scientists and engineers who encounter difficult linear systems in their work. These are technically trained experts in other fields, who need the rapid prototyping capabilities and also need some high level guidance on navigating among the possible solution methods. They also want usable source code that incorporates successful solution strategies for their class of problems.
Students in computational science. This group needs much more guidance from the LSA information subsystem, and needs to have good history and scripting mechanisms to "replay" and revisit sessions.

Although initially the LSA is most usable by the first group, from the beginning it has been designed and built with mechanisms to accomodate all of the users: multilevel, extensible information subsystem, code extraction and encapsulation, visual interfaces which aid memory of past experiments, and component wrappers which make it easy for users to add their own computational components.

Next page: Using the LSA

bramley@cs.indiana.edu

Last updated: Tue Jan 26 12:29:42 1999