Object Oriented Methods for Interoperable Scientific and Engineering Computing (Proceedings in Applied Mathermatics, 99)

There is a growing awareness in universities and industrial and government laboratories that object oriented methods have the potential to greatly improve the usefulness of computers in science and engineering. There are many efforts underway to redesign and reimplement large codes written in the 1970s and 1980s to take advantage of the improvement in maintainability and flexibility that object oriented designs offer. Repositories such as Netlib and indices like GAMS have improved our ability to share code, but making the shared code useful requires widespread agreement about how the code is structured and how scientific and engineering codes should interoperate.

This volume contains papers presented at the October 1998 SIAM Workshop on Object Oriented Methods for Interoperable Scientific and Engineering Computing that covered a variety of topics and issues related to designing and implementing computational tools for science and engineering. Some examples include tools for ODEs and PDEs, discussions of how to write abstract code without loss of performance, and practical advice based on experiences.

The book includes experiences of both developers and industrial users of software, highlighting the difficult issues and merits of different approaches used in the aircraft, automotive, and petroleum industries, as well as national laboratories. There are also "real-world" papers in which authors have used spreadsheets, problem-solving environments like MATLAB, and other non-API interfaces to meet the demands of engineering user communities.

Michael E. Henderson is a research staff member in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Christopher R. Anderson is Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. Stephen L. Lyons is Senior Research Advisor for Mobil Technology Company.