The ELLPACK system is designed to support the performance evaluation of elliptic partial differential equations software. It includes (a) a very high-level problem statement language for elliptic PDEs, (b) a collection of 50+ problem solving software modules, (c) a population of 150+ elliptic PDEs, (d) a system to create experiments and measure performance, and (e) a database of experimental results with a statistical analysis facility. The ELLPACK system is the outgrowth of a cooperative project to study methods and software for elliptic problems. This project is coordinated by J. R. Rice. Substantial participation and contributions of software have been made by 29 people from 16 different institutions. It is designed to be a research tool to evaluate and compare mathematical software for solving elliptic problems. The idea is to create a system where individuals can contribute software modules which either completely or partially solve an elliptic problem. Those modules that partially solve the problems (e.g., discretize it) are combined with other modules to complete the solution. With all the software operating in the same environment one can make systematic performance evaluations of the modules. Several studies of this type have been made.
Considerable effort has been put into making ELLPACK easy to use. Standard elliptic problems can be stated and solved directly. More complex problems, including nonlinear, time dependent, and simultaneous equations, can be solved using more advanced facilities. The documentation is the book Solving Elliptic Problems Using ELLPACK by J. R. Rice and R. Boisvert, 1985. This system is distributed by Purdue and has been installed at about 200 sites in 23 countries on about 20 different computers.