According to Gallopoulos, Houstis, and Rice, "A Problem-Solving Environment (PSE) is a computer system that provides all the computational facilities necessary to solve a target class of problems. These features include advanced solution methods, automatic and semiautomatic selection of solution methods, and ways to easily incorporate novel solution methods. Moreover, PSEs use the language of the target class of problems, so users can run them without specialized knowledge of the underlying computer hardware or software. By exploiting modern technologies such as interactive color graphics, powerful processors, and networks of specialized services, PSEs can track extended problem solving tasks and allow users to review them easily. Overall, they create a framework that is all things to all people: they solve simple or complex problems, support rapid prototyping or detailed analysis, and can be used in introductory education or at the frontiers of science."
The Ctadel system is a domain-specific PSE that generates efficient codes for climate models. Ctadel has convincingly been applied to automatically translate high-level descriptions of climate equations into different versions of highly optimized fortran codes running on vector and parallel computers. The code generated by this software system was shown to be as efficient as the weather forecast production code that has been carefully optimized by hand. Important features of Ctadel are its extensibility to other sets of equations, its symbolic processing capabilities, and the use of an object-oriented knowledge base with rule-based inference methods for problem solving.
Collaboration with the HIRLAM Project
Implementation of a parallel HIRLAM weather forecasting model. HIRLAM is a cooperative project of Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. It is used in several of these European countries for routine weather forecast productions. The meteorological data generated by HIRLAM are also essential input to a wide range of environmental models.
Many decisions in today's society are made based on short- and long-term weather forecasts. Because of the major economic impact of such decisions, research and development of numerical weather forecast systems has been ongoing since the beginning of this century. Today numerical weather forecasting, as part of climate modeling, is classified as one of the "Grand Challenges'' in computational science
The Ctadel system is a domain-specific PSE that generates efficient codes for climate models. The design objective for Ctadel's problem solving technology is the so-called "machine-independent programming-in-the-large environment'', which must be able to generate efficient execution codes for different computer architectures typically from architecture-independent problem specifications.
Ctadel code generation of the HIRLAM DYNAMICS
Ctadel: Code-generation Tool for Applications based on Differential Equations using high-level Language specifications
Robert A. van Engelen, ATMOL: A Domain-Specific Language for Atmospheric Modeling, in the Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 2002.
Robert van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, Tomorrow's Weather Forecast: Automatic Code Generation for Atmospheric Modeling, IEEE Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 3, July/September 1997, pages 22-31.
Conference tracks organized:
A Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model
Collaborative efforts with Professor Dewar from Oceanography at the Florida State University to use the Ctadel PSE to develop couple ocean-atmosphere models.
P. van der Mark, R. van Engelen, K. Gallivan and W. Dewar, A Case Study for Automatic Code Generation on a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model, submitted to the Journal of Physical Oceanography, 2002.
P. van der Mark, R. van Engelen, K. Gallivan, and W. Dewar, A Case Study for Automatic Code Generation on a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model, in the proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Computational Science, April 21-24, 2002, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
L. Kohout, A. Strotmann, and R. van Engelen, Knowledge Engineering Methods for Climate Models in proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Conference.
htmlatex2html
Htmlatex2html converts HTML that contains embedded LaTeX typesetting commands to pure HTML for authoring math on the Web. The presentation of scientific problems requires a Web interface that supports mathematical notation. The Ctadel PSE uses GIF images, which are cumbersome to view. Instead, the htmlatex2html tool produces scalable mathematical expressions in HTML.
MP for SWI Prolog
We developed a multi-precision library for SWI Prolog to handle big numbers in our Ctadel PSE. The MP package is based on the GNU multi-presision library. The MP 1.3 package for SWI Prolog is available for download from the SWI Prolog site.
Funding was provided by the Florida State University Center of Excellence and a Florida State University FYAP award.