MCSD maintains contact with a variety of international groups seeking to improve the infrastructure for computational science and engineering. The following are examples of such contacts.
MCSD staff are collaborating with researchers of Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) on network infrastructure for high performance computing. As part of this work, ETL is providing a Japanese mirror of the NIST Matrix Market, a visual database of large sparse matrices from industrial applications, while NIST is incorporating interative matrix generation software from ETL into the Matrix Market.
ITL is active in the IFIP Working Group on Numerical Software (WG 2.5), which is part of the IFIP Technical Committee on Programming Languages (TC 2). Ronald Boisvert of MCSD, who was elected to membership in WG 2.5 last year, edited the proceedings of the IFIP WG 2.5 Conference on the Quality of Numerical Software held in July 1996 in Oxford, England. The proceedings were published this year in book form by Chapman & Hall. It contains papers by R. Boisvert, K. Remington and R. Pozo on the NIST Matrix Market, and by D. Lozier on the NIST Software Testing Service for Special Functions.
As part of a cooperative agreement between NIST and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) , Daniel Lozier of MCSD has been participating in a scientific exchange with Dr. Yuri Rappoport of the RAS Institute for Computer Aided Design. They are working on algorithms for the MacDonald, or modified Bessel, functions. These arise as the kernel of the Kantorovich-Lebedev integral transform, for which little software exists in Western computer libraries. Lozier visited the Russian Academy for two weeks in the fall of 1996, while Rappoport visited NIST for three months during the summer of 1997. While in Moscow, Lozier met with many high ranking scientists, including Academician Yu. S. Osipov, President of the RAS, Academician O. M. Belotserkovski, Head of the Institute for Computer Aided Design, Prof. A. N. Nikiforov, Head of the Division of Computational Physics at Moscow State University, and Academician V. M. Amerbaev, member of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences.
Paul Boggs served on the Organizing Committee of the Second PanAmerican Workshop on Applied and Computational Mathematics which was held in Gramado, Brazil in September 1997.