High-performance simulations in computational science often involve the combined software contributions of multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. One goal of component-based software engineering in large-scale scientific simulations is to help manage such complexity by enabling better interoperability among codes developed by different groups. This paper discusses recent work on building component interfaces and implementations in parallel numerical toolkits for mesh manipulations, discretization, linear algebra, and optimization. We consider several motivating applications involving partial differential equations and unconstrained minimization to demonstrate this approach and evaluate performance.

This paper describes a computing environment named WBCSim that is intended to increase the productivity of wood scientists conducting research on wood-based composite materials. WBCSim integrates Fortran 77-based simulation codes with a graphical front end, an optimization tool, and a visualization tool. WBCSim serves as a prototype for the design, construction, and evaluation of larger scale problem solving (computing) environments. Several different wood-based composite material simulations are supported. A detailed description of the prototype's software architecture and a typical scenario of use are presented. The system converts output from the simulations to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) for visualizing simulation results.