Scientific Software Design

This book concerns software design. Although many current discussions of scientific programming focus on scalable performance, this book focuses on scalable design. The authors analyze how the structure of a package determines its developmental complexity according to such measures as bug search times and documentation information content. The work presents arguments for why these issues impact solution cost and time more than does scalable performance. The final chapter explores the question of scalable execution and shows how scalable design relates to scalable execution. The book's focus is on program organization, which has received considerable attention in the broader software engineering community, where graphical description standards for modeling software structure and behavior have been developed by computer scientists. These discussions might be enriched by engineers who write scientific codes. This book aims to bring such scientific programmers into discussion with computer scientists. The authors do so by introducing object-oriented software design patterns in the context of scientific simulation.

Damian Rouson is currently the manager of the Reacting Flow Research Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He was formerly Section Head of the US Navy Research Laboratory Division of Combustion Science and Modeling. He was Assistant Professor of Engineering at the City University of New York and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. Damian Rouson received his Masters and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr Jim Xia is currently a software designer and tester at the IBM Test Laboratory in Markham, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Western Ontario in 1997.

Dr Xiaofeng Xu is currently a Software Analyst at General Motors Corp. in Pontiac, Michigan. In this job, he performs airflow and combustion CFD analysis to support base engine designs. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (2003) from Iowa State University in Ames, IA and is the author or co-author of 39 refereed publications.