Scalable Scientific Software Libraries and Problem Solving Environments

Software librarie.s provide encapsulated problem solving power and problem solving environments (PSEs) give ordinary users painless access to problem solving power. Thus the structure of libraries and the design of PSEs are inextricably linked. This workshop explored the stateof-the-art in these two areas and their interdependence. A few application areas (e.g., linear algebra) have a rather simple structure for a software library and a very widely known language (mathematics) to usc as the basis for a PSE (e.g" MATLAB). This simplicity and standard language are missing for most of the important scientific application areas where both the libraries and the PSEs are embryonic. These application areas also have almost unlimited complexity so that high performance computing power is essential. Thus both the PSE design and library structure must be scalable in the complexity of the applications. The workshop focused on partial differential equations (PDE) based applications and closely related areas for its examples.