Research Associates: T. Drashansky, M. Mu, N. Ramakrishnan
The National Information Infrastructure (NII) that will emerge in the 1990's will impact many institutions of life; it will change the way we learn and do science, access information, work, collaborate, and design physical systems. This future computational power and communication infrastructure will allow computing everywhere. The new economic realities require the rapid prototyping of manufactured artifacts and rapid solutions to problems with numerous interrelated elements. This, in turn, requires the fast, accurate simulation of physical processes and design optimization using knowledge and computational models from multiple disciplines in science and engineering. Thus, the realization of rapid multidisciplinary problem solving or prototyping is the new grand challenge for Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E). We refer to a software realization of multidisciplinary prototyping as a Multidisciplinary Problem Solving Environment (MPSE). We undertake research that is needed to formulate and develop a mathematical and software framework for MPSE including the tools, enabling technologies, and underlying theories needed to support physical prototyping in the classroom, laboratory, desk, and factory. It will utilize the current and future NII facilities and HPCC technologies. MPSEs will be adaptable and intelligent with respect to end-users and hardware platforms. They will be built using collaborating software systems and agent based techniques and allow wholesale reuse of scientific software. They will also provide a natural approach to parallel and distributed problem solving.
Information regarding this project is available at the
SciAgents
and
Domain Decomposition
web sites.