Summary

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.

Project Descriptions

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.

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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 PSE

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:

  1. IMACS Applications of Computer Algebra (ACA) 2000 Conference Special Session on Problem Solving Environments.
  2. IMACS Applications of Computer Algebra (ACA) 1999 Conference Special Session on Problem Solving Environments.

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.

Visit the htmlatex2html site

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.

Visit the MP 1.3 page

Funding

Funding was provided by the Florida State University Center of Excellence and a Florida State University FYAP award.

Students

Links

Publications

  1. Robert A. van Engelen, ATMOL: A Domain-Specific Language for Atmospheric Modeling, in the Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 2002.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Robert van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, The Ctadel Application Driver for Numerical Weather Forecast Systems, proceedings of the 15th IMACS World Congress (session: Problem Solving Environments for Scientific Computing), (ed. A. Sydow), vol. 4, Wissenshaft & Technik Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 1997, pages 571-576.
  7. Robert A. van Engelen, Ilja Heitlager, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, Incorporating Application Dependent Information in an Automatic Code Generating Environment, proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, July 7-11, 1997, Vienna, Austria, pages 180-187.
  8. Robert van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, PDE-Oriented Language Compilation and Optimization with Ctadel for Parallel Computing, proceedings of the HIPS'97 Second International Workshop, April 1-5, 1997, Geneva, Switzerland, IEEE Computer Society Press, pages 105-109.
  9. Robert A. van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, Automatic Code Generation for High Performance Computing in Environmental Modeling, proceedings of the 1996 EUROSIM International Conference on HPCN Challenges in Telecomp and Telecom: Parallel Simulation of Complex Systems and Large-Scale Applications, June 10-12, 1996, Delft, the Netherlands, pages 421-428.
  10. Lex Wolters, Robert A. van Engelen, and Gerard Cats, Automatic Code Generation: Ctadel, proceedings of the 17th EWGLAM and SRNWP meeting, LAM Newsletter, Number 25, May 1996, pp. 137-143.
  11. Robert A. van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, The Ctadel Code Generation Tool for PDE-based Scientific Applications, proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, June 5-7 1996, Lommel, Belgium, pages 120-125.
  12. Robert A. van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, Multi-Platform Code Generation for the HIRLAM Dyn Routine with Ctadel, proceedings of the HIRLAM workshop on Variational Data Assimilation, February 1996, De Bilt, the Netherlands, pages 115-122.
  13. Robert A. van Engelen, Lex Wolters, and Gerard Cats, Ctadel: A Generator of Multi-Platform High Performance Codes for PDE-based Scientific Applications, proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, May 25-28 1996, Philadelphia, USA, ACM Press, pages 86-93.
  14. Robert A. van Engelen and Lex Wolters, A Comparison of Parallel Programming Paradigms and Data Distributions for a Limited Area Numerical Weather Forecast Routine, proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, July 3-7 1995, Barcelona, Spain, pages 357-364.
  15. Robert A. van Engelen and Lex Wolters, Parallelization of a Finite Difference Application: a Comparison of Parallel Programming Paradigms and Data Distributions, proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, May 16-18 1995, Heijen, the Netherlands, pages 28-36.
  16. Lex Wolters, Robert A. van Engelen, Gerard Cats, Nils Gustaffson, and Tomas Wilhelmsson, A Data-Parallel HIRLAM Forecast Model, in Geerd-R. Hoffmann and Norbert Kreitz (eds.), Coming of Age, proceedings of the Sixth ECMWF Workshop on the Use of Parallel Processors in Meteorology, World Scientific Publ., 1995, pages 49-62; also Technical Report 94-47, Department of Computer Science, Leiden University, November 1994.