This project will design and implement user interface systems for scientific and engineering computation, with special emphasis on the parallel computing environment. The work involves activity in several areas: graphical interaction and visualization, computation strategies, and domain specific research in computational fluid dynamics. The latter area serves as the "test bed" for the interface research. The overall objective is to provide the engineer and scientist with high performances, interactive computation environments that allow prototyping exploration ("what if?" experimentation) by combining interactive graphics, high performance (parallel) computation, with an intelligent interface that allows problem input in physical, rather than programmatic expression. Research on the user interface will enhance our present version by addition of such features as detection of problem based parallelism (such as embodied in singular perturbation problems). The interactive graphics work will concentrate on constraint based object-oriented systems. Emphasis is to be placed on the Model-View-Controller paradigm as a basis for the user's interaction with his prototype model to effect computational steering. The computation strategies research is concentrating on new models for parallel computing, such as object-oriented parallel computation, and the development of new parallel computation library modules to support engineering computation. The domain specific (computational fluid dynamics, or CFD) work is directed at parallel computing for nonlinear dynamics problems (such as Lagrangian turbulence dynamics), and the integration into interactive environments for CFD numerical exploration. This research is as continuation of on-going efforts in the Rutgers CAIP* Parallel Computing Lab, and is proposed as a joint NSF-CAIP program. *CAIP (Center for Computer Aids for Industrial Productivity).
