Software engineering frontiers in computational science and engineering

ABSTRACT

In 1991, the US Congress passed the High Performance Computing and Communications bill, commonly known as the HPCC bill, enshrining the Grand Challenges as national priorities. The very nature of these problems require the multidisciplinary teamwork of engineers plus computer, mathematical and physical scientists. But many important scientific and engineering problems are solved daily on workstations---these were dubbed the "petty challenges". Both classes of problem are demanding computational systems although quite different from non-scientific systems.We review a philosophical background for CSE, using this development to point out how seemingly innocuous decisions made by engineers and scientists can have disastrous results. Hence, software engineers should see CSE as a professional challenge. Our program is based on studying applications, the algorithms to solve problems arising in those applications, and the mapping of those algorithms to architectures. Using Computing Reviews categories, we outline the subjects required for understanding CSE systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: Errett J. Bishop and Douglas Bridges. Constructive Analysis. Springer-Verlag, 1985.
• 2: Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology. Grand Challenges 1994: High Performance Computing and Communications. NSF, National Science Foundation, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, 1800 G Street N.W., Washington, DC 20550, 1994. May be obtained via e-mail through pubsnote.nsf.gov.
• 3: George E. Forsythe , Michael A. Malcolm , Cleve B. Moler, Computer Methods for Mathematical Computations, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, 1977
• 4: W. Kahan , J. Palmer, On a proposed floating-point standard, ACM SIGNUM Newsletter, v.14 n.si-2, p.13-21, October 1979 [doi>10.1145/1057520.1057522]
• 5: Morris Kline. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Oxford University Press, 1980.
• 6: John R. Rice, Academic Programs in Computational Science & Engineering, IEEE Computational Science & Engineering, v.1 n.1, p.13-21, March 1994 [doi>10.1109/99.295373]
• 7: Ahmed Sameh , John Riganati, Computational Science and Engineering, Computer, v.26 n.10, p.8-12, October 1993
• 8: D. E. Stevenson, Science, computational science, and computer science: at a crossroads, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.12, p.85-96, Dec. 1994 [doi>10.1145/198366.198386]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
computational science, scientific programming, software engineering