SoftLab : Virtual Laboratories for Computational Science

The laboratory provides an ideal environment to accept and meet the challenges of computational engineering and science. The facility leverages the infrastructure and support bases we have built through the Computing About Physical Objects project (CAPO). The facility benefits from an environment with strong expertise in mathematical software, electronic prototyping, geometric modeling, parallel algorithms, databases, software engineering, and computer systems. The facility is a catalyst for significant research in computational engineering and science, both within the Computer Science Department, as well as in other departments, and so accelerates the maturation of a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects that are beginning to create a critical mass of applications-oriented research and expertise in computational science. This effort is SoftLab.

A central group effort within SoftLab addresses the full range of issues in the future paradigm of computational science. It creates four problem solving environments: rigid-body mechanics, idealized internal combustion engine design, and two chemical engineering applications. These involve a core group of computational scientists (Christoph Hoffmann, Elias Houstis, John Rice) and applications scientists.

There are a number of basic research efforts in parallel and distributed computing that use SoftLab facilities in an essential way. These include projects in computational biology, simulation, parallel algorithms, cryptology, software engineering, and computational geometry. There are several projects which use the laboratory facilities to build prototype systems for computational science. These include collaboration with researchers in projects in chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, and biochemistry. As the facility matures, we plan to expand the number of such collaborations.

The focus of SoftLab is to create a laboratory with a software layer above the familiar "physical" wet and dry laboratories of science and engineering. The project builds the needed software and algorithmic infrastructure for some of the important activities in a lab and produces the electronic analog of a scientific laboratory environment for important applications. The functional view of the architecture of SoftLab consists of five layers of application-specific and generic software. Much of this infrastructure will be based on the results and experience of the CAPO project.

The SoftLab research focuses on the creation of environments, tools, and infrastructure needed in an electronic laboratory for computational science. A fully functional SoftLab requires the creation of this software for two purposes, namely integrating diverse tools and infrastructure into application-specific problem solving environments (PSEs), and harnessing the enormous computing power of well-coordinated parallel and distributed computations. The infrastructure needed by both types of research overlaps.

The logical levels of the research are as follows. On the lowest level we find infrastructure research. This work develops tools, methodologies, and data repositories used at the higher levels. The work includes research on geometry models, research into numerical and parallel methods, software engineering issues in PSE construction, and heterogeneous data base research. Most of this research can be viewed as a continuation of work begun by CAPO.

Parallel and distributed computations pose key problems in achieving the performance needed by sophisticated PSEs. Moreover, it is also a research topic in its own right. Several research projects focusing specifically on these issues. Much of this research provides the necessary tools and insights into effectively coordinating diverse and parallel hardware in PSEs.

Problem solving environments, finally, integrate infrastructure with parallel and distributed computing for important applications in science and in engineering. There are several PSE development projects, both in Science and in Engineering, which are highly collaborative and experimental in nature. They include projects that continue directly with the integration theme of CAPO.

The study and creation of problem solving environments for scientific computations and its applications is the common focus of SoftLab proposal. We are building prototypes of actual PSEs for a number of applications that represent large-scale, intelligent, very high-level PSEs for science and engineering. We consider several such environments: