Examples of PSEs and current PSE research projects

  • DOE's ASCI project has a PSE component. Other ASCI sites are Sandia and Los Alamos.

  • Purdue's PSE Group: including PELLPACK, PDELab, Softlab, Pythia, the HPC PSE project, and the PSE Kernel. Ann Catlin maintains a nice PSE Overview Page at Purdue as well.

  • University of Missouri: the Mobile Systems and Intelligent Middleware Lab, which includes projects called SciencePad and SciAgents.

  • The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse is extremely active in applying Web-based technology to large scale application areas. Projects of interest at NPAC include SciVis, Tango, WebFlow, Java for Scientific Computing. Here is a list of NPAC references on Web Based HPCC.

  • The PSEware project, coordinated by a group at Indiana. They want to build a toolkit for building PSEs. This is a multi-institution, multidisciplinary research project on PSEs focused on symbolic computation, user interfaces and collaborative technologies for parallel object-oriented programming. It includes a PSE builder called MetaPSE. They are in collaboration with the Infospheres project at Cal Tech. Drexel is also participating.

  • The SCI (Scientific Computing and Imaging) group at Utah has several projects in PSE-related areas, including SCIRun ("A Scientific Programming Environment for Computational Steering") and SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator).

  • There is PSE work going on at the Univ. of Leeds (UK), including a project called Kinex which is a PSE for reaction kinetics within the IRIS Explorer visualization system, and COVISA, a project to "investigate industrial requirements for multi-user, distributed visualization."

  • The Environmental Programs Group at MCNC (North Carolina Supercomputing Center) is building systems to couple several disciplines in environmental science and decision support systems. See especially the EDSS system. A very interesting and important application area.

  • AVS. Advanced Visual Systems is one of the leading commercial supplier of scientific visualization tools. Their basic system (AVS5) is for end-users who need to visualize complex data sets. It uses a visual programming interface.

    They also have something called AVS/Express which claims to be ``... a multi-platform, component-based software environment for visualizing complex data and for building applications with interactive visualization and graphics functions. AVS/Express provides Object Kits that contain numerous reusable objects for building visualization applications or application components.'' So that sounds like it could be used as a PSE-builder.

  • CUMULVS. From the group that brought us PVM. From the web page at Oak Ridge National Lab, ``CUMULVS is a software infrastructure for the development of collaborative environments. It supports interactive visualization and remote steering of distributed applications by multiple collaborators, and provides fault tolerance to applications running in heterogeneous distributed environments.''

  • The DOE 2000 ACTS Toolkit project (Advanced Computational Testing and Simulation) includes many PSE-related projects. Of particular interest are
    • POET (Parallel Object-oriented Environment and Toolkit).
    • CUMULVS (Collaborative User Migration User Library for Visualization and Steering). See comments above.
    • PAWS (Parallel Application WorkSpace). See also Los Alamos PAWS page.
    • SILOON (Scripting Interface Languages for Object-Oriented Numerics).
    • PADRE (Parallel Asynchronous Data and Routing Engine).

  • General purpose math systems like Macsyma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB can certainly be viewed as PSEs.

  • Sites not yet reviewed carefully, but that look relevant:
    • Efforts to define standards for communicating mathematical information over the Net:
    • PolyMath, a project of the Centre for Experimental & Constructive Mathematics (CECM) at Simon Fraser University, Canada. From their homepage, they are trying to provide "... sophisticated, network-based, environments for working in the mathematical sciences."
    • The Biology Workbench from NCSA.
    • Los Alamos: Hyrdra, Justine.
    • Visual Science
    • Mathcad
    • Products from National Instruments, including HiQ, ``... an interactive problem-solving environment where users organize, visualize, and document real-world math, science, and engineering problems.''
    • The Arcade project from ICASE and ODU.
    • The Globus project from Argonne.
    • The MetaWeb project from Germany.
    • The NetSolve project from ORNL/UT-Knoxville.
    • The Network-Enabled Optimization System (NEOS) from Argonne.
    • Another on-line optimization system, this one from Carnegie Mellon.
    • An electronic notebook for DOE's CHAMMP development team (doesn't look like it was ever used).
    • The DIAS (Dynamic Information Architecture System) project at Argonne, which is apparently involved in a system called DEEM (Dynamic Environmental Effects Model).
    • The Habanero project at NCSA (Illinois).
    • The Collaboratory Builder's Environment (Michigan). And DistView (compressed postscript). This work is used in the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC) project at UM. There is also a Medical Collaboratory Testbed project underway at UM.
    • The Interdisciplinary and Industrial Applications Group of the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS/SCSC) has several PSE-related projects.
    • Products from Numerical Objects AS, a company that specializes in object-oriented numerical software, including Diffpack.
    • Products from The MathWizards, a company that sells ``matlab look-alike'' tools including something called ``MathXplorer/Java: the first matlab-compatible Java computational engine.''
    • PDESOL.

  • Areas where there is considerable commercial software available (note: most of these sites were discovered by reading Scientific Computing & Automation):

  • An obvious motivating application for PSEs is ``Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization''

  • The SciTools conferences are full of PSE-related work: see 1996 and 1998.