A Collaborative Code Development Environment for Computational Electro-magnetics

A Problem Solving Environment (PSE) is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling and running applications in a specific problem area or domain. We describe a visual code development tool within a PSE, which enables computational scientists to construct applications by connecting components. The granularity of each component can vary from being a complete code, to a mathematical routine such as a matrix or PDE solver. We first outline the requirements of such an environment, illustrating these with our implementation. The implementation of a computational electro-magnetic solver is then described using this code development tool, based on a 2D boundary element code. We emphasise lessons learned, and the importance of using such an environment to support new application development.