We collaborate with a variety of groups with representatives from industry, government and academia which are working jointly to improve the environment for computational science and engineering. The following are two examples.
This working group is developing standards for core mathematical software components which promote both performance and portability of scientific software. Optimized implementations of the earliest versions the standards, known as the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS), are now supported by most hardware and software manufacturers of scientific computing products. The BLAS Technical Forum is composed of representatives of computer hardware and software manufacturers as well as government and academic research labs who wish to extend the BLAS to new domains. Roldan Pozo and Karin Remington of ITL represent NIST. Pozo chairs the sparse matrix subcommittee.
OpenGL is a portable software interface for applications to generate interactive 2D and 3D graphics; it is designed to be independent of operating system, window system and hardware operations, and is supported by many vendors. The OpenGL interface is defined for the C programming language, and it has thus been difficult for scientific applications written in Fortran to attain the portability promised by OpenGL. William Mitchell of MCSD has developed f90gl, a complete Fortran 90 binding for OpenGL, along with a reference implementation. The binding received a favorable initial review from the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, with members representing Digital, Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intergraph, Intel, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics. It also received a favorable review from the J3 Fortran standards committee. It is now a candidate for the official Fortran binding for OpenGL.