Scientific Software Design: The Object-Oriented Way

This book concerns software design. Although many current discussions of scientific programming focus on scalable performance, this book focuses on scalable design. The authors analyze how the structure of a package determines its developmental complexity according to such measures as bug search times and documentation information content. The work presents arguments for why these issues impact solution cost and time more than does scalable performance. The final chapter explores the question of scalable execution and shows how scalable design relates to scalable execution. The book's focus is on program organization, which has received considerable attention in the broader software engineering community, where graphical description standards for modeling software structure and behavior have been developed by computer scientists. These discussions might be enriched by engineers who write scientific codes. This book aims to bring such scientific programmers into discussion with computer scientists. The authors do so by introducing object-oriented software design patterns in the context of scientific simulation.

DR. Damian Rouson is the manager of the Reacting Flow Research Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He was formerly Section Head of Combustion Modeling and Scaling at die U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He was assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the City University of New York, visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Special Scientist at the University of Cyprus. Damian Rouson received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at Howard University and his Masters and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. DR. Jim Xia is-currently a software designer and tester at the IBM Canada Lab in Markham, Ontario, Canada. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Western Ontario in 1997 DR. Xiaoffeng Xu is currently an Analyst at General Motors Corp. in Pontiac, Michigan. At this job he performs airflow and combustion CFD analysis to support base engine designs. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering (2003) from Iowa State, University, in Ames and is the author or co-author of 39 referred publications