Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division

Summary of Activities for Fiscal Year 1999

Information Technology Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Technology Administration
U. S. Department of Commerce

January 2000

Montage of division staff. See caption below.

 

Abstract

This document summarizes activities of the ITL Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division for FY 1999, including technical highlights, project descriptions, lists of publications, and examples of industrial interactions.

Questions regarding this document should be directed to Ronald F. Boisvert, Mail Stop 8910, NIST, 100 Bureau Drive, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8910 (boisvert@nist.gov).

 

Photo captions (clockwise from top):

  1. Ron Boisvert, Roldan Pozo, and Bruce Miller discuss the SciMark benchmark developed for the Java Grande Forum.
  2. Isabel Beichl teaches a course on no-numeric algorithms for scientific computing.
  3. Chris Witzgall (far left) and Javier Bernal (far right) discuss use of terrain modeling in automated monitoring construction site activity with colleagues from the NIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory.

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Part I: Overview Background
Overview of Technical Program
Technical Highlights
Administrative Highlights
Part II: Project Descriptions Mathematical Modeling Group Computer Graphic Rendering of Material Surfaces
Direct Blind Deconvolution
Machining Process Metrology, Modeling and Simulation
Mathematical Modeling of Solidification
Micromagnetic Modeling
Object-Oriented Finite Element Analysis of Material Microstructures
Optimization in Practice
Time-Domain Modeling Algorithms for Electromagnetic Devices
Tools for Genome Sequence Analysis

Mathematical Software Group Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
Fortran 90 Bindings for OpenGL
Information Services for Computational Science: GAMS, Matrix Market
Java Numerics
Jazznet: Cost-effective Parallel Computing
Parallel Adaptive Refinement and Multigrid Finite Element Methods
Sparse BLAS Standardization
Support of the NIST Computing Environment
TNT: Object Oriented Numerical Computing

Optimization and Computational Geometry Group Computing the Partition Function
Terrain Modeling
Part III: Activity Data
Publications Appeared
Accepted
Submitted
In Process
Presentations Invited Talks
Conference Presentations
Conferences, Workshops and Lecture Series Shortcourses
MCSD Seminar Series
DLMF Seminar Series
Conference/Workshop Organization
Software Released
Electronic Resources Developed and Maintained
External Contacts
Other Professional Activities
Internal
External
Outreach Activities
External Funding
Part IV: Staff

Appendix Acronyms Used in this Report

 

 

Part I

Overview

 

Micrograph (cross-section) of a 
material with thermal barrier coating.   OOF identifies four 
constituants within the micrograph.

OOF allows its users to design 
a computational experiment.   OOF enables users to visualize
the result of the experiment.

Micrograph of a thermal barrier coating (top left) and its realization in OOF.

 

Background

The mission of the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division (MCSD) is as follows.

Provide technical leadership within NIST in modern analytical and computational methods for solving scientific problems of interest to U.S. industry. The division focuses on the development and analysis of theoretical descriptions of phenomenon (mathematical modeling), the design of requisite computational methods and experiments, the transformation of methods into efficient numerical algorithms for high-performance computers, the implementation of these methods in high-quality mathematical software, and the distribution of software to NIST and industry partners.

Within the scope of our charter, we have set the following general goals.

With these goals in mind, we have developed a technical program in three general areas.

  1. Mathematical modeling in the physical sciences, engineering, and information technology.
  2. Development of algorithms and tools for high-performance mathematical computation.
  3. Development and dissemination of mathematical reference information.

The first area is done primarily via collaborations with other technical units of NIST. Projects in the second area are typically motivated by internal NIST needs, but have products, such as software, which is widely distributed. The third area reflects work done primarily for the computational science community at large, although NIST staff benefits.

We have developed a variety of strategies to increase our effectiveness in dealing with such a wide customer base. We take advantage of leverage provided via close collaborations with other NIST units, other government agencies, and industrial organizations. We develop tools with the highest potential impact, and make online resources easily available. We provide educational and training opportunities for NIST staff. Finally, we select areas for direct external participation that are fundamental and broadly based, especially those where measurement and standards can play an essential role in the development of new products.

Division staff maintain expertise in a wide variety of mathematical domains, including linear algebra, special functions, partial differential equations, computational geometry, Monte Carlo methods, optimization, inverse problems, and nonlinear dynamics. Application areas in which we have been actively involved in this year include materials science, fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, manufacturing engineering, construction engineering, wireless communications, optics, bioinformatics, image analysis and computer graphics.

Output of Division work includes publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings, technical reports, lectures, short courses, software packages, and Web services. In addition, MCSD staff members participate in a variety of professional activities, such as refereeing manuscripts and proposals, service on editorial boards, conference committees, and offices in professional societies. Staff members are also active in educational and outreach programs for mathematics students at all levels.

 

Overview of Technical Program

A list of recent activities in each of the division focus areas follow. Note that individual projects may have complementary activities in each of these areas. For example, the micromagnetic modeling work has led to the OOMMF software package, as well as to a collection of standard problems used as benchmarks by the micromagnetics community. Further details on many of these efforts can be found in Part II of this report.

Mathematical modeling in the physical sciences, engineering, and information technology.

Development of algorithms and tools for high-performance mathematical computation.

Development and dissemination of mathematical reference information

To complement these activities, we engage in short-term consulting with NIST scientists and engineers, conduct a lecture series, and sponsor shortcourses and workshops in relevant areas. Information on the latter can be found in Part III of this report.

 

Technical Highlights

In this section, we highlight a few of the significant accomplishments of MCSD this past year. Further details on the technical accomplishments of the division can be found in Parts II and III.

Digital Library of Mathematical Functions Receives NSF Support. In September 1999, MCSD received substantial funding from the National Science Foundation to support the development of the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF). The NIST proposal entitled Mathematical Foundations for a Networked Scientific Knowledge Base was awarded $1.3M over three years by the NSF Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) program with support from the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. The NIST award was one of 31 given by the KDI program in FY 1999, and the only one awarded to a non-academic institution.

The DLMF will provide NIST-certified reference data and associated information for the higher functions of applied mathematics. Such functions possess a wealth of highly technical and critically important properties that are used by engineers, scientists, statisticians, and others to aid in the construction and analysis of computational models in a variety of applications. The DLMF will deliver this data over the World Wide Web within a rich structure of semantic-based representation, metadata, interactive features, and internal/external links. It will support diverse user requirements such as simple lookup, complex search and retrieval, formula validation and discovery, automatic rule generation, interactive visualization, custom data on demand, and pointers to software and evaluated numerical methodology.

The DLMF was conceived as the successor for the NBS Handbook of Mathematical Functions (AMS 55), edited by M. Abramowitz and I. Stegun and published by NBS in 1964. AMS 55 is possibly the most widely distributed and cited NBS/NIST technical publication of all time. (The U.S. Govt. Printing Office has sold over 150,000 copies, and commercial publishers are estimated to have sold several times that number). The DLMF is expected to contain more than twice as much technical information as AMS 55, reflecting the continuing advances of the intervening 40 years.

The DLMF is being developed by a team of researchers in ITL and PL led by Daniel Lozier, Frank Olver, Charles Clark and Ron Boisvert. Additional support is being provided by MEL's Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) program, TS's Standard Reference Data Program, and the ATP Adaptive Learning Systems program. NSF funding will be used to contract for the services of experts on mathematical functions to develop and validate the technical material that will make up the DLMF. The project is a substantial undertaking, with some 60 participants expected from outside NIST.

OOF Named Technology of the Year. In December 1999 Industry Week magazine named NIST as one of its 1999 Technology of the Year award winners for the development of OOF. OOF is an object-oriented finite-element system for the modeling of real material microstructures. It was created by Steve Langer of MCSD in collaboration with Andy Roosen and Ed Fuller of the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory (MSEL), and Craig Carter of MIT (formerly of MSEL). OOF shared the spotlight with technologies such as a roentgen high-resolution flat-panel display from IBM, and Toyotas Pirius hybrid gas/electric vehicle.

The OOF user begins with a realistic microstructural geometry by loading a two dimensional image of a real or simulated material into the program. The behavior of a material on the macroscopic scale depends to a large extent on its microstructure, the complex ensemble of polycrystalline grains, second phases, cracks, pores, and other features existing on length scales large compared to atomic sizes. OOF allows materials scientists to determine the influence of microstructure on a material's macroscopic properties through an easy-to-use graphical interface. Features in the image (e.g., grains, pores, and grain boundaries) are identified and assigned local material properties (e.g. crystalline symmetry and orientation, elastic constants, or thermal expansion coefficients). By applying stresses, strains, or temperature changes the user can measure the effective macroscopic material behavior, or can examine internal stress, strain, and energy density distributions. OOF currently handles only thermoelasticity, but extensions to other material properties are planned.

Beginning in FY2000 the OOF team will be cooperating with scientists at General Electric in a DOE-sponsored project to investigate the use of OOF as a quality control tool on the shop floor. It will be extended to simulate the performance of thermal barrier coatings for turbine blades.

Java Numerics Project Leads to Changes in Java. Java, a network-aware programming language and environment developed by Sun Microsystems, has already made a huge impact on the computing industry. Recently there has been increased interest in the application of Java to high performance scientific computing. Recommendations of a technical working group chaired by MCSD were instrumental this year in the adoption of a fundamental change in the way floating-point numbers are processed in Java. This change will lead to significant speedups to Java code running on Intel microprocessors like the Pentium. The recommendations were made by the Numerics Working Group of the Java Grande Forum (JGF), a consortium of industry, government, academia participants interested in the use of Java for high-performance computing applications. Ron Boisvert and Roldan Pozo co-chair the working group. Participants include IBM, Least Squares Software, Numerical Algorithms Group, Visual Numerics, The MathWorks, Syracuse University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and the University of California at Berkeley.

All Java programs run in a portable environment called the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The behavior of the JVM is carefully specified to insure that Java codes produce the same results on all computing platforms. Unfortunately, emulating JVM floating-point operations on the Pentium leads to a four- to ten-fold performance penalty. The Working Group studied an earlier Sun proposal, producing a counter-proposal which was much simpler, more predictable, and which would eliminate the performance penalty on the Pentium. Sun decided to implement the key provision of the Numerics Working Group proposal in Java 1.2, which was released in the spring of 1999.

Tim Lindholm, Distinguished Engineer at Sun, one of the members of the original Java project, the author of The Java Virtual Machine Specification, and currently one of the architects of the Java 2 platform said:

Our best attempts led to a public proposal that we considered a bad compromise and were not happy with, but were resigned to. ... The counterproposal was both very sensitive to the spirit of Java and satisfactory as a solution for the performance problem. ... We are sure that we ended up with a better answer for [Java] 1.2, and arrived at it through more complete consideration of real issues, because of the efforts of the Numerics Working Group.

The working group also advised Sun on the specification of elementary functions in Java, which lead to improvements in Java 1.3 which was released in the fall of 1999.

Advances in Blind Deconvolution. Alfred Carasso has made some remarkable early advances this year in so-called blind deconvolution. In this problem, one seeks to deblur an image without knowing the cause of the blur. This is a very difficult mathematical problem. Existing approaches have been iterative in nature, but are both computationally intensive and unreliable. Rather than attempting to solve the problem in its full generality, Carasso identifies a wide class of important blurs that includes and generalizes Gaussian and Lorentzian distributions (class G). Likewise, a large class of sharp images is characterized in terms of its behavior in the Fourier domain (class W). Based on empirical observations which have not previously been exploited, Carasso has shown how 1-D Fourier analysis of blurred image data can be used to detect class G point spread functions acting on class W images. A separate image deblurring technique uses this detected point spread function to deblur the image. Each of these two steps uses direct non-iterative methods, and requires interactive adjustment of parameters. With this approach, blind deblurring of 512x 512 images can be accomplished in minutes on current desktop workstations. The technique has been successfully applied to images from the NIST Physics Lab, as well as to a wide variety of test images. This work has just been written up, but it is already attracting wide interest.

Awards. Several staff members received significant awards this year in addition to the Industry Week Technology of the Year Award received by Stephen Langer and OOF.

Anthony Kearsley was one of two NIST staff members selected to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the National Science and Technology Council. The award is given to those who, while early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century. He was cited for his work in the application of optimization methods in a wide variety of areas. (Roldan Pozo of MCSD won this award in 1996.) Later in the year, Kearsley received a joint invitation from the U.S. National Academy of Science and the Chinese Academy of Science to participate in the second annual Frontiers in Science Symposium, which was held in Beijing on August 20-22. This invitational symposium brought together outstanding American and Chinese scientists from many disciplines to discuss important technical challenges facing their fields.

In January 2000, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) named Ronald Boisvert as the winner of the 1999 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. Boisvert was cited for his "leadership and innovation as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software and his exceptional contributions to the ACM Digital Library project". ACM has honored 29 people for service to the society since the awards inception in 1976. Boisvert will receive the award at ACMs annual awards ceremony to be held in San Francisco in May 2000.

Technology Transfer. MCSD staff members continue to be active in publishing the results of their research. This year 32 publications appeared which were authored by Division staff, 21 of which appeared in refereed journals. Fourteen additional papers have been accepted for publication in refereed journals. Another 16 manuscripts have been submitted for publication and 27 are being developed.

MCSD staff members were also invited to give 40 lectures in a variety of venues and contributed another 19 talks at conferences and workshops. Two shortcourses where provided by MCSD for NIST staff this year. Isabel Beichl presented Non-numerical Methods for Scientific Computing and William Mitchell presented another on Fortran 90 for Scientists and Engineers. Both were very well attended. The Division lecture series remained active, with 26 talks presented (nine by MCSD staff members); all were open to NIST staff. In addition, MCSD staff members were involved in the organization of nine external conferences, workshops, and minisymposia.

Software continues to be a by-product of Division work, and the reuse of such software within NIST and externally provides a means to make staff expertise widely available. This year saw the initial release of the SciMark benchmark, a collection of Java applets and related software for measuring the performance of Java Virtual Machines for numeric-intensive computation. Faculty appointee G. W. Stewart issued the first release of Jampack, a Java package for numerical linear algebra. In contrast to the user-level Jama package released by the MathWorks and MCSD last year, Jampack is based upon a design that provides extensive features to linear algebra experts; it also supports complex matrices. Several existing MCSD software packages saw new releases this year, including OOMMF (micromagnetic modeling), f90gl (OpenGL graphics interface for Fortran 90), and TNT (Template Numerical Toolkit for numerical linear algebra in C++).

Web resources developed by MCSD continue to be among the most popular at NIST. The MCSD Web server at math.nist.gov has serviced more than 20 million Web hits since its inception in 1994 (7 million of which have occurred in the past year!) Altavista has identified more than 5,000 external links to the Division server. The NIST Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS), a cross-index and virtual repository of mathematical software, is used more than 10,000 times each month. During a recent 36-month period, 34 prominent research-oriented companies in the .com domain registered more than 100 visits apiece to GAMS. The Matrix Market, a visual repository of matrix data used in the comparative study of algorithms and software for numerical linear algebra, sees more than 100 users each day. It has distributed more than 16 Gbytes of matrix data, including more than 64,000 matrices, since its inception in 1996.

Professional Activities. Division staff members continue to make significant contributions to their disciplines through a variety of professional activities. This year Daniel Lozier was elected chair of the SIAM Special Interest Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions. Ronald Boisvert continues as a member of the ACM Publications Board.

Division staff members continue to serve on journal editorial boards. Ronald Boisvert serves as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. Daniel Lozier is an Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation and the NIST Journal of Research. Geoffrey McFadden is an Associate Editor of Journal of Computational Physics, SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, as well as the new journal Interfaces and Free Boundaries

Division staff members work with a variety of external working groups. Ronald Boisvert and Roldan Pozo chair the Numerics Working Group of the Java Grande Forum. Roldan Pozo chairs the Sparse Subcommittee of the BLAS Technical Forum. Michael Donahue and Donald Porter are members of the Steering Committee of muMag, the Micromagnetic Modeling Activity Group. Ronald Boisvert is a member of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.5 (Numerical Software) of Technical Committee 2 (Programming Languages).

 

Administrative Highlights

Four staff members and one postdoc left MCSDs ranks during this year. James Blue, leader of the Mathematical Modeling Group, retired in September 1999 after 20 years of service to NBS/NIST. John Gary, an MCSD staff member in Boulder, retired in December 1998 after more than 15 years of service to NBS/NIST. Both Blue and Gary have retained affiliation with MCSD as guest researchers. Janet Rogers, a 30-year NBS/NIST veteran in Boulder, retired in June 1999. She is pursuing a new career in economic modeling for the governor of Colorado. Karin Remington left in January 1999 to pursue a career in bioinformatics at Celera Genomics in Rockville, MD. Finally, Bruce Fabijonas completed his two-year tenure as a NRC postdoctoral appointee, taking a tenure track position in the Mathematics Department at Southern Methodist University.

David Sterling, who recently received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Colorado, joined the NIST staff in Boulder in the fall of 1998 as a NRC postdoctoral appointee. In the fall we also made an offer to a recent Ph.D. to join the MCSD staff in Boulder. We expect this person to come on board in March 2000.

Finally, in late 1999 Joyce Conlon was transferred to MCSD from the ITL High Performance Systems and Services Division. She will be providing systems and programming support to a number of division projects.

Two MCSD staff members are currently on developmental assignments. Anthony Kearsley is spending half time at Carnegie-Mellon University during FY1999 and FY2000. He is working with researchers in the Computer Science Department there on applications of optimization methods to problems in networking and computer security. Bradley Alpert began a year visit at the Courant Institute of NYU where he is working with Leslie Greengard and colleagues on fast semi-analytic methods with applications in electromagnetic modeling.

Student Employment Program. MCSD provided support for seven student staff members on summer appointments during FY 1999. Such appointments provide valuable experiences for students interested in careers in mathematics and the sciences. In the process, the students can make very valuable contributions to MCSD programs. This years students were as follows.

Student

Supervisor

Project

Elaine Kim

Montgomery Blair High School Stanford University

G. McFadden

Effects of surface anisotropy on surface diffusion in materials science. A paper for submission to a technical journal is in process.

Scott Safranek

Montgomery Blair High School
Columbia University

(Scott was a finalist in the 1999 Intel Talent Search)

A. Kearsley
F. Hunt

Computational complexity and applications to gene structures.

Phillip Yam

Montgomery Blair High School

I. Beichl

Monte Carlo matrix multiplication with application to information retrieval.

Brianna Blaser

Carnegie Mellon University

R. Boisvert
R. Pozo

Evaluation of the speed and accuracy of proposed Java elementary function libraries and development of benchmark codes for SciMark.

Eden Crane

Montgomery College

F. Hunt

Fractal dimension calculation of planar representations of DNA sequences, and Web presentation of computer graphic images from the reflectance competency.

Melinda Sandler

Carnegie Mellon University

A. Kearsley
F. Hunt

Numerical algorithms for enhanced protein sequence identification.

Galen Wilkerson

University of Maryland

R. Pozo

Reference implementation of the sparse BLAS.

Employee Survey. In the spring of 1999, NIST contracted with an independent firm to survey all employees, asking detailed questions regarding the NIST work environment. The results were aggregated at the NIST, Laboratory, and Division levels and presented to all NIST staff. For MCSD, the results showed general satisfaction with the Division-level work environment. Staff members feel that their colleagues are skilled, cooperative, and motivated. First line managers are supportive and responsive. Staff members understand what is expected of them, and have the tools and authority needed to carry out their jobs. The survey also uncovered some serious concerns with the research environment within the NIST Labs in general and ITL in particular. Several division meetings were held to discuss the concerns of staff. These culminated in the development of a Division action plan outlining steps that should be taken at the Division, Lab, and NIST level to address staff concerns. Several of these have begun to be implemented at the Division level. Division recommendations have been folded into a Laboratory level action plan.

Strategic Planning. This year MCSD initiated a formal strategic planning process. All staff members participated in several meetings in which several views of future technical issues affecting Division work were proposed and discussed. A consensus was obtained on major areas in which MCSD should play a role, and specific recommendations for future actions were laid out. The major trends identified as part of the strategic vision of the division are summarized below.

The ordinary industrial user of complex modeling packages has few tools available to assess the robustness, reliability, and accuracy of models and simulations. Without these tools and methods to instill confidence in computer generated predictions, the use of advanced computing and information technology by industry will lag behind technology development. NIST, as the nations metrology lab, is increasingly being asked to focus on this problem.

Research studies undertaken by laboratories like NIST are often outside the domain of commercial modeling and simulation systems. Consequently, there is a great need for the rapid development of flexible and capable research-grade modeling and simulation systems. Components of such systems include high-level problem specification, graphical user interfaces, real-time monitoring and control of the solution process, visualization, and data management. Such needs are common to many application domains, and re-invention of solutions to these problems is quite wasteful.

The availability of low-cost networked workstations will promote growth in distributed, coarse grain computation. Such an environment is necessarily heterogeneous, exposing the need for virtual machines with portable object codes. Core mathematical software libraries must adapt to this new environment.

All resources in future computing environments will be distributed by nature. Components of applications will be accessed dynamically over the network on demand. There will be increasing need for online access to reference material describing mathematical definitions, properties, approximations, and algorithms. Semantically rich exchange formats for mathematical data must be developed and standardized. Trusted institutions, like NIST, must begin to populate the net with such dynamic resources, both to demonstrate feasibility and to generate demand, which can ultimately be satisfied in the marketplace.

The NIST Laboratories will remain a rich source of challenging mathematical problems. MCSD must continually retool itself to be able to address needs in new application areas and to provide leadership in state-of-the-art analysis and solution techniques in more traditional areas. Many emerging needs are related to applications of information technology. Examples include VLSI design, security modeling, analysis of real-time network protocols, image recognition, object recognition in three dimensions, bioinformatics, and geometric data processing. Applications throughout NIST will require increased expertise in discrete mathematics, combinatorial methods, data mining, large-scale and non-standard optimization, stochastic methods, fast semi-analytical methods, and multiple length-scale analysis.

These issues, as well as proposed MCSD responses, are detailed in the MCSD Strategic Plan, available upon request. The MCSD plan provided input to the ITL Strategic Plan, which has just been finalized. MCSDs plans are consistent with those of the Laboratory and of NIST as a whole.

Olga Taussky Todd Conference. Several MCSD staff members participated in a symposium honoring Olga Taussky Todd, a mathematical pioneer and a former staff member of NBS, held July 16-18, 1999 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. The symposium, entitled "The Olga Taussky Todd Celebration of Careers in Mathematics for Women" was organized and sponsored by the American Women in Mathematics (AWM). Besides honoring Taussky Todd (1906-1995), one of the century's most important American mathematicians, the symposium showcased contemporary women mathematicians whose careers mirror aspects of Taussky Todd's work. A third objective was to foster the careers of upcoming female mathematicians. During the 1950's, Taussky-Todd and her husband John Todd worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis (INA), part of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards housed on the campus of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Isabel Beichl, an MCSD mathematician, and Dianne O'Leary, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and MCSD faculty appointee, were members of the organizing committee. Beichl also gave a presentation about Taussky Todd's years at NBS. MCSD mathematician Fern Hunt was a plenary speaker. In a talk entitled, "A Mathematician at NIST Today" she spoke about current interdisclipinary research on the light scattering properties of coated surfaces. All three staff members participated in the mentoring activities that were a uniquely engaging and lively part of the conference.

 

 

Part II

Project Descriptions

 

Computer model of automobile
with gray metallic paint rendered with the aid of optical measurements.
Optical measurements of an automobile painted with gray metallic paint made at NIST are the basis for this graphical image rendered by Gregory Ward Larson.

 

 

Mathematical Modeling Group

 

Computer Graphic Rendering of Material Surfaces

Fern Y. Hunt
Gary Meyer (University of Oregon)
Gregory Ward Larson (Silicon Graphics Inc.)

http://math.nist.gov/~FHunt/webpar4.html

For some years computer programs have produced images of scenes based on a simulation of scattering and reflection of light off one or more surfaces in the scene. In response to increasing demand for the use of rendering in design and manufacturing, the models used in these programs have undergone intense development. In particular more physically realistic models are sought (i.e. models that more accurately depict the physics of light scattering). However there has been a lack of relevant measurements needed to complement the modeling. As part of a NIST project entitled "Measurement Science for Optical Reflectance and Scattering" (http://ciks.cbt.nist.gov/appearance/), Fern Hunt is coordinating the development of a computer rendering system that utilizes high quality optical and surface topographical measurements performed here at NIST. The systems will be used to render physically realistic and potentially photorealistic images. Success in this and similar efforts can pave the way to computer based prediction and standards for appearance that can assure the quality and accuracy of products as they are designed, manufactured and displayed for electronic marketing.

Dr. Hunt is collaborating with Gary Meyer of the University of Oregon and Gregory Ward Larson of Silicon Graphics Inc. This work is part of a competence project on the appearance of painted and coated surfaces involving four laboratories, ITL, BFRL, MEL, and PL. In addition to the rendering work, Dr. Hunt has also been modeling the microstructure of metallic coatings using point processes.

Highlights for FY 1999 included the following.

 

Direct Blind Deconvolution

Alfred S. Carasso

Blind deconvolution seeks to deblur an image without knowing the cause of the blur. This is a difficult mathematical question that is not fully understood. For example, the 1D problem turns out to be harder than the 2D problem! So far, most approaches to blind deconvolution have been iterative in nature, but the iterative approach is generally ill behaved, often developing stagnation points or diverging altogether. When the iterative process is stable, a large number of iterations may be necessary to resolve fine detail.

The present approach does not attempt to solve the blind deconvolution in full generality. Rather, attention is focused on a wide class of blurs that includes and generalizes Gaussian and Lorentzian distributions, and has significant applications. This is the class G. Likewise, a large class of sharp images is exhibited and characterized in terms of its behavior in the Fourier domain.  This is the class W. It is shown how 1-D Fourier analysis of blurred image data can be used to detect class G point spread functions acting on class W images. This approach is based on empirical observations about the class W that have not previously been exploited in the literature. A separate image deblurring technique uses this detected point spread function to deblur the image. Each of these two steps uses direct non-iterative methods, and requires interactive adjustment of parameters. As a result, blind deblurring of 512x 512 images can be accomplished in minutes of CPU time on current desktop workstations. This is considerably faster than what is currently feasible by iterative methods.

There is a great deal of interest in blind deconvolution at several U.S. Government Laboratories, including the Air Force Phillips Laboratory where tracking and monitoring of orbiting space objects is a major activity. Blind deconvolution is also an active field of research at several universities, including Minnesota, Stanford, and UCLA. At NIST, this approach has been successfully applied to improve images obtained from several types of electronic microprobes in use in the NIST Surface and Microanalysis Sciences Division.

Analysis of the blind problem within the class G has produced a number of interesting and unexpected results. These results can stimulate further research by other investigators. This work is totally original and has opened new avenues in this difficult subject. Current research aims at developing direct methods that can be applied to important types of blurs not included in G.

 

Machining Process Metrology, Modeling and Simulation

Timothy Burns
Matt Davies (NIST MEL)
Chris Evans (NIST MEL)
Jon Pratt (NIST MEL)
Tony Schmitz (NIST MEL)

This is a continuing collaboration on projects in high-speed milling and hard turning (turning hardened steels on a lathe) with researchers in MELs Automated Production Technology Division (APTD). The mission of APTD is to fulfill the measurements and standards needs of U.S. discrete-parts manufacturers in mechanical metrology and advanced manufacturing technology.

The high-speed milling work involves the development and application of new models of the dynamic interactions among tool, workpiece, and machine, in order to take full advantage of the material removal capabilities offered by state-of-the-art machines. Such processes are limited more by machine tool chatter than by catastrophic thermal tool failure. In particular, low-immersion cutting strategies that could minimize tool wear as well as provide surface finishes that do not require subsequent costly hand polishing are under investigation.

Traditional machine-tool chatter stability theory involves the study of functional differential equations. A typical practical problem involves the use of Laplace transform methods to map the boundaries in at least a two-dimensional parameter space (e.g., width of cut vs. cutting speed) between stable and unstable response regions for a given system. For very low-immersion cutting, this type of analysis breaks down because the tool is not in contact with the workpiece much of the time. This year, a simple model for low-immersion milling was developed, based on an impact-oscillator model. This has led to a much simpler stability analysis that has been experimentally verified for a specific system.

In a number of industries, including large manufacturers such as Boeing and Caterpillar, work is underway to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of large-scale finite-element software to assist in the prototyping of high-speed machining processes such as hard turning. APTD and MCSD are actively involved in this effort. While considerable progress has been made in the development of predictive models for low-strain-rate manufacturing processes, there is currently a need for improved predictive capabilities for high-rate processes. The accuracy of any model of a large-scale manufacturing operation is limited by how well it can predict the most basic components of the operation. Of these components, chip morphology is certainly the most fundamental, because it provides a direct record of the complex nonlinear plastic material flow process that determines the cutting forces and the temperature along the tool-material interface. These in turn have a dominant effect on tool wear as well as surface finish and subsurface damage of the workpiece.

Material strain hardening was added to the one-dimensional orthogonal cutting model of Davies, Burns, and Evans. It was shown that this could explain the chaotic transition from continuous to shear-localized chip formation that has been observed to take place with increasing cutting speed in a number of materials.

Collaboration with Carol Johnson and Howard Yoon of the Optical Technology Division in the NIST Physics Lab has been re-funded by ATP for FY99-00. This work has involved the development of a device to measure the temperature gradient across the thin region called the primary shear zone where metal cutting takes place in, for example, a hard-turning operation. The work has also involved the development of an experimental setup in MEL for the cutting experiments, and the acquisition and application of a commercial finite-element code by ITL. The software has been helpful in designing the experiments. Ultimately, if the experiments are successful, they will be useful for the validation of any finite-element simulations of high-speed metal-cutting operations.

 

Mathematical Modeling of Solidification

Geoffrey B. McFadden
Daniel Anderson
Richard Braun
Bruce Murray William Boettinger (NIST MSEL)
John Cahn (NIST MSEL)
Sam Coriell (NIST MSEL)
Bernard Billia (University of Marseille)
Alex Chernov (University Space Research Association)
Robert Sekerka (Carnegie-Mellon University)
Adam Wheeler (University of Southampton)

Mathematical modeling is frequently used to understand and predict the properties of processed materials as a function of the processing conditions by which the materials are formed. During crystal growth of alloys by solidification from the melt, the homogeneity of the solid phase is strongly affected by the prevailing conditions at the solid-liquid interface, both in terms of the geometry of the interface and the arrangements of the local temperature and solute fields near the interface. Instabilities that occur during crystal growth can cause spatial inhomogeneities in the sample that significantly degrade the mechanical and electrical properties of the crystal. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding and controlling these instabilities, which generally include interfacial and convective modes that are challenging to model by analytical or computational means.

A long-standing collaborative effort between the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division and the Metallurgy Division has included support from the NASA Microgravity Research Division as well as extensive interactions with university and industrial researchers. In the past year a number of projects have been undertaken that address outstanding issues in materials processing through mathematical modeling. In collaboration with Sam Coriell (855), William Boettinger (855), and Robert Sekerka (Carnegie Mellon University), the dynamics of interfaces in layered geometries for multicomponent materials were studied. These studies are motivated by diffusion problems in thin films and junctions, where the nucleation and growth of additional intermetallic phases can occur during processing. The studies are based on finding similarity solutions that describe the dynamics and geometry of the growing phases, which result in nonlinear equations that describe the interface motion. An interesting outcome of the research is that multiple solutions can be obtained that share the same initial conditions, suggesting that the specific evolution of interfaces that are observed in such systems may be highly sensitive to the details of the system preparation prior to processing.

NIST scientists have been in the forefront of the development of solidification models that feature interfaces that are not sharp, (having zero width), but instead are diffuse with a finite width over which the phase transition occurs. John Cahn (850) pioneered models for the spinodal decomposition of alloys (the Cahn-Hilliard equation) and in the motion of phase boundaries in ordered materials (the Allen-Cahn equation) that are based on such diffuse interface descriptions. Models of this type are of computational as well as theoretical interest, since they can form the basis for numerical schemes that can treat complicated free boundary problems while avoiding the need to track the motion of the interface explicitly. In collaboration with William Boettinger (855), Dan Anderson (George Mason University) and Adam Wheeler (University of Southampton), we have extended such models to include the effects of convection in the melt. These models are being applied to simulate the effects of convection during dendritic growth, where the models capability to describe both convection and changes in interface topology may allow the understanding of grain formation due to the transport of dendrite fragments within the crystal.

Other projects that have been undertaken this year include work with Sam Coriell (855) and Robert Sekerka (CMU) on models of dendritic growth, work with John Cahn (850), Adam Wheeler (University of Southampton), and Richard Braun (University of Delaware) on diffuse interface models of order-disorder transitions, work with Elaine Kim (Stanford University undergraduate) on the effects of surface tension anisotropy on the pinch-off of axisymmetric rods, work with Sam Coriell (855) and Bernard Billia (University of Marseille) on models of Peltier Interface Demarcation, and work with Sam Coriell (855), Bruce Murray (University of Binghamton), and Alex Chernov (University Space Research Associates) on models of step formation during facetted crystal growth.

 

Micromagnetic Modeling

Michael Donahue
Donald Porter
James Blue
Robert McMichael (NIST MSEL)

http://math.nist.gov/oommf/
http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~rdm/mumag.html

The engineering of such IT storage technology as magnetic recording media, GMR sensors for read heads, and magnetic RAM (MRAM) elements requires an understanding of magnetization patterns in magnetic materials at a submicron scale.  Mathematical models are required to interpret measurements at this scale.  The Micromagnetic Modeling Activity Group (muMAG) was formed to address fundamental issues in micromagnetic modeling through two activities: the definition and dissemination of standard problems for testing modeling software, and the development of public domain reference software.  MCSD staff is engaged in both of these activities. Their Object-Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework (OOMMF) software package is a reference implementation of micromagnetic modeling software.  Their achievements in this area since October 1998 include:

Software releases

Standard problems

Supporting the micromagnetics comminuty

Scientific contributions

Ongoing development

 

OOF: Finite Element Analysis of Material Microstructures

Stephen Langer
Edwin Fuller (NIST MSEL)
Andrew Roosen (NIST MSEL)
Craig Carter (MIT)

http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/oof/

The OOF Project, a collaboration between MCSD, MSEL's Ceramics Division, MIT, is developing software tools for analyzing real material microstructure.  The microstructure of a material is the (usually) complex ensemble of polycrystalline grains, second phases, cracks, pores, and other features occurring on length scales large compared to atomic sizes.  The goal of OOF is to use data from a micrograph of a real material to compute the macroscopic behavior of the material via finite element analysis.  It was originally designed as a tool for industrial and academic researchers in materials science, but a group at General Electric has proposed using it to monitor the manufactured quality of the ceramic thermal barrier coatings on turbine blades.  GE and NIST received a grant from DOE to develop OOF for this application.  A number of universities have inquired about its possible use as a teaching tool.

In December 1999, OOF was named one of the 25 Technologies of the Year by Industry Week magazine. Other notable events of the last year include:

 

Optimization in Practice

Anthony Kearsley

Many important problems arising in science and engineering are often most conveniently handled by casting them as optimizations, to be solved with numerical algorithms implemented as computer programs. These practical problems frequently require optimization under complex constraints, involve large unmanageable matrices, and/or call for ad hoc procedures. Such pathologies have not yet been systematically analyzed and classified.

We are currently concerned with the development and analysis of algorithms for the solution of such problems as they are encountered at NIST. These specialized and uniquely structured problems of estimation, simulation and control of complex systems have surfaced in a variety of areas such as the modeling of

Of particular interest are nonlinear optimization problems that involve computationally intensive function evaluations. The problems are ubiquitous; they arise in simulations with finite elements, in making statistical estimates, or in simply dealing with functions difficult to handle. In many such examples, we have been successful by comparing choices in the implementation of optimization algorithms. In asking, "What makes one formulation for the solution of a problem more desirable than another?" we study the delicate balance among the choices of mathematical approximation, computer architecture, data structures and other factors. For the solution of many applications-driven problems, the proper balance of these factors is crucial.

 

Time-Domain Modeling Algorithms for the Design of Electromagnetic Devices

Bradley Alpert
Leslie Greengard (New York University)
Thomas Hagstrom (University of New Mexico)

Radiation and scattering of acoustic and electromagnetic waves are increasingly modeled using time-domain computational methods, which incrementally advance a solution in time according to the governing differential equations.  This general approach is receiving increasing attention due its promise for modeling wide-band signals, material inhomogeneities, and device nonlinearities.  The applications requiring these capabilities include the design of antennas, low-visibility aircraft, microcircuits, and transducers, nondestructive testing of mechanical devices, and medical and geophysical imaging, among others.

For many of these applications, the accuracy of the computed models is of central importance.  Nevertheless, existing methods typically allow for only limited control over accuracy and cannot achieve high accuracy for reasonable computational cost.  The goal of this project is the development of algorithms and codes for high-accuracy time-domain computations, addressing the key weaknesses of existing methods. These include accurate nonreflecting boundary conditions (that reduce an infinite physical domain to a finite computational domain), suitable geometric representations of scattering objects, and rapidly convergent, stable spatial and temporal discretizations for realistic scatterer geometries.

This project in prior years has already achieved a major advance in applying the exact nonreflecting boundary conditions (which are global in space and time).  An integral equation formulation of the boundary conditions has led to a scheme whose computational cost is O(N log N) in two dimensions and O(N2 log N) in three dimensions, for a domain N wavelengths across, as compared with O(N2) and O(N3), respectively, for the interior grid work.

This year another significant advance was achieved, which is expected to eliminate the "small cell" problem for explicit, high-order marching. When a nontrivial scatterer meets a Cartesian discretization, small cells are inevitably created and generally lead to instabilities in explicit time evolution schemes.  Historically, this fact has forced a choice between the undesirable options of implicit time marching and elaborate mesh generation, and sometimes both of these options have been employed to get stability with high-order convergence.  A new integral evolution formula for the wave equation was discovered this year that, quite simply, leads to explicit, high-order discretizations that appear immune to the small cell problem.  An implementation in one spatial dimension has been reported; implementations in two and three dimensions are under development.

 

Tools for Genome Sequence Analysis

Fern Hunt
Antti Pesonen

As part of an exploratory project in bioinformatics funded by the NIST Information Technology Laboratory, Fern Hunt and guest researcher Antti Pesonen have developed a software tool that can be used to investigate statistical and complexity patterns of DNA sequences. The selection of features was motivated firstly by their potential usefulness in answering questions that are frequently addressed in the bioinformatics literature, and secondly by their amenability to graphical display and visualization. Production level sequencing of entire genomes (e.g. bacterial genomes, all 16 chromosomes of yeast) has become routine for simpler organisms, and very rapid progress is being made in the sequencing of the genomes of higher organisms including human beings. These efforts have led to DNA sequences of from several hundred thousand bases for a virus genome, to dozens of millions for a single human chromosome. Consequently, our goal has been to integrate quantitative and visual methods very closely.

As part of an effort to develop tests and to characterize probability models of DNA sequences, the program GenPatterns displays subsequence frequencies and their patterns of recurrence from a sliding window applied to sequence data. Bacterial genomes and chromosome data can be downloaded from GENBANK. A color-coded matrix represents the histogram of subsequence frequencies. The display is based on a tensor product of a two by two matrix based on the four DNA bases A, C, T, G. There are zoom and navigation features that allow one to move through a large data set and remain oriented so that one can investigate the prevalence of specific longer sequences e.g. oligomers (length eight), that are of biological significance.

A great deal of work has been done on modeling DNA sequences as the sample path of a stochastic process. Despite the theoretical difficulty of viewing sequence data as stationary, these models have been fairly successful in gene identification and location of so-called binding sites in mRNA, a sequence quite similar to DNA. GenPatterns has a feature that allows one to compare the model to the data in various ways. A color-coded matrix histogram can be used to visually assess the predicted versus actual subsequence frequencies. There are also provisions for numerical comparison that are under development. The program allows comparison to be made with data and Markov models of arbitrary order. These are expected to be useful in modeling local features of selected parts of the data. There are also features based on the common practice of mapping DNA to paths that are analogous to random walks. This is very useful for, although DNA sequences resemble real random sequences, they differ in significant respects, and this class of tools provides a convenient visual distinction. Quantitatively speaking, this distinction is the basis of methods based on statistical significance and maximum likelihood commonly used in computational biology.

 

 

Mathematical Software Group

 

Digital Library of Mathematical Functions

Daniel Lozier
Ronald Boisvert
Marjorie McClain
Bruce Miller
F. W. J. Olver
Bonita Saunders
Bruce Fabijonas
Qming Wang (NIST ITL)
Charles Clark (NIST PL)
Peter Mohr (NIST PL)
David Penn (NIST PL)

http://math.nist.gov/DigitalMathLib/

NIST/NBS is known for providing standard reference data in physical sciences and engineering. Less well known is the fact that NIST also supplies reference data in mathematics. The prime example is the NBS Handbook of Mathematical Functions, prepared under the editorship of Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun and published in 1964 by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The NBS Handbook is a technical best seller, and likely is the most frequently cited of all technical references. Total sales to date of the government edition exceed 150,000; further sales by commercial publishers are several times higher. Its daily sales rank on amazon.com consistently surpasses other well-known reference books in mathematics, such as Gradshteyn and Ryzhik's Table of Integrals. The number of citations reported by Science Citation Index continues to rise each year, not only in absolute terms but also in proportion to the total number of citations. Some of the citations are in pure and applied mathematics but even more are in physics, engineering, chemistry, statistics, and other disciplines. The main users are practitioners, professors, researchers, and graduate students.

Except for correction of typographical and other errors, no changes have ever been made in the Handbook. This leaves much of the content unsuitable for modern usage, particularly the large tables of function values (over 50% of the pages), the low-precision rational approximations, and the numerical examples that were geared for hand computation. Also, numerous advances in the mathematics, computation, and application of special functions have been made or are in progress. We have begun a project to transform this old classic radically. The Digital Library of Mathematical Functions: A New Web-Based Compendium on Special Functions will be published on the Internet and in a book edition with CD-ROM. The Internet edition will be provided free-of-charge from a NIST Standard Reference Data Web Site. The Web Site and CD-ROM will include capabilities for searching, downloading, and visualization.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and NIST, the DLMF Project is contracting with the best available world experts to rewrite all existing chapters, and to provide additional chapters to cover new functions (such as the Painlevé transcendents) and new methodologies (such as computer algebra). The work is being supervised by four NIST editors (Lozier, Olver, Clark, and Boisvert) and an international board of ten associate editors. The associate editors are

Richard Askey (University of Wisconsin),
Michael Berry (University of Bristol),
Walter Gautschi (Purdue University),
Leonard Maximon (George Washington University),
Morris Newman (University of California at Santa Barbara),
Peter Paule (Technical University of Linz),
William Reinhardt (University of Washington),
Ingram Olkin (Stanford),
Nico Temme (CWI Amsterdam), and
Jet Wimp (Drexel University).

Major achievements since the beginning of FY 1999, are as follows:

 

Fortran 90 Bindings for OpenGL

William Mitchell

http://math.nist.gov/f90gl/

The Fortran 90 bindings for the OpenGL graphics library were developed by MCSD, and have been adopted by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) as the official OpenGL Fortran 90 interface.  OpenGL is a software interface for applications to generate interactive 2D and 3D computer graphics. OpenGL is designed to be independent of operating system, window system, and hardware operations, and is supported by many vendors, with products for computing platforms from PCs to supercomputers. The ARB is the governing board of OpenGL, and consists of members from a variety of companies with OpenGL products including ATI, Compaq, Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Intergraph, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Silicon Graphics.

In conjunction with this work, Mitchell has developed f90gl, a public domain reference implementation of the Fortran 90 bindings. Since its initial release three years ago, it has been downloaded approximately 5000 times.  Several vendors have begun using f90gl as part of their products or providing access to f90gl from their product web pages, including Absoft, Compaq, Interactive Software Services, Lahey, and N. A. Software.

Highlights for this year include:

 

Information Services for Computational Science: GAMS, Matrix Market

Ronald Boisvert
Bruce Miller
Marjorie McClain
Roldan Pozo
Karin Remington

http://math.nist.gov/gams/
http://math.nist.gov/MatrixMarket/

MCSD continues to provide Web-based information resources to the computational Science research community. The first of these is the Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS). GAMS is a cross-index and virtual repository of some 9,000 mathematical and statistical software components of use in science and engineering research. It catalogs software, both public domain and commercial, that are supported for use on NIST central computers by ITL, as well as software assets distributed by netlib. While the principal purpose of GAMS is to provide NIST scientists with information on software available to them, the information and software it provides are of great interest to the public at large. GAMS users locate software via several search mechanisms. The most popular of these is the use of the GAMS Problem Classification System. This system provides a tree-structured taxonomy of standard mathematical problems that can be solved by extant software. It has also been adopted for use by major math software library vendors.

A second resource provided by MCSD is the Matrix Market, a visual repository of matrix data used in the comparative study of algorithms and software for numerical linear algebra. The Matrix Market database contains more than 400 sparse matrices from a variety of applications, along with software to compute test matrices in various forms. A convenient system for searching for matrices with particular attributes is provided. The web page for each matrix provides background information, visualizations, and statistics on matrix properties.

This year we purchased a two new Division server systems, both Sun UltraSPARC 60s. Considerable effort was expended in converting our existing setup from SunOS 4.1 to the new Solaris 2 servers. Our main server, math.nist.gov, was placed in the NIST central computing facility on the new external network (outside the new NIST firewall), while the native GAMS database server was placed on a new internal server, math-i.nist.gov. A mirroring facility was set up to automatically all static Division web pages from the internal server to the external server. Finally, a new system for maintaining server logs was developed and implemented.

The Web resources developed by MCSD continue to be among the most popular at NIST. The MCSD Web server at math.nist.gov has serviced more than 20 million Web hits since its inception in 1994 (7 million of which have occurred in the past year!) Altavista has identified more than 5,000 external links to the Division server. GAMS is used more than 10,000 times each month. During a recent 36-month period, 34 prominent research-oriented companies in the .com domain registered more than 100 visits apiece to GAMS. The Matrix Market sees more than 100 users each day. It has distributed more than 16 Gbytes of matrix data, including more than 64,000 matrices, since its inception in 1996.

The utility of these systems is demonstrated by their adoption in other contexts. This year, for example, several new numerical analysis textbooks recommend use of GAMS to their students:

Waterloo Maple Inc. is planning to include support for I/O of Matrix Market format matrices in the next release of Maple.

 

Java Numerics

Ronald Boisvert
Bruce Miller
Roldan Pozo
Karin Remington
G.W. Stewart

http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/
http://math.nist.gov/scimark/

Java, a network-aware programming language and environment developed by Sun Microsystems, has already made a huge impact on the computing industry. Recently there has been increased interest in the application of Java to high performance scientific computing. MCSD is participating in the Java Grande Forum (JGF), a consortium of companies, universities, and government labs who are working to assess the capabilities of Java in this domain, and to provide community feedback to Sun on steps that should be taken to make Java more suitable for large-scale computing. The JGF is made up of two working groups: the Numerics Working Group and the Concurrency and Applications Working Group. The former is co-chaired by R. Boisvert and R. Pozo of MCSD. Among the institutions participating in the Numerics Working Group are: IBM, Intel, Least Squares Software, NAG, Sun, Visual Numerics, Syracuse University, the University of Karlsruhe, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

This year, MCSD staff presented the findings of the Working Group in a variety of forums, including

In June 1999, MCSD issued a second report on Working Group recommendations. Comments on these recommendations formed the bulk of a keynote address presented by Bill Joy at the ACM Java Grande Conference in San Francisco later that month. Joy, the developer of Berkeley Unix, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and co-author of the original Java specification, endorsed the work of the JGF, as well as most of the recommendations of the Numerics Working Group.

Earlier recommendations of the Numerics Working Group were instrumental in the adoption of a fundamental change in the way floating-point numbers are processed in Java. This change will lead to significant speedups to Java code running on Intel microprocessors like the Pentium. All Java programs run in a portable environment called the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The behavior of the JVM is carefully specified to insure that Java codes produce the same results on all computing platforms. Unfortunately, emulating JVM floating-point operations on the Pentium leads to a four- to ten-fold performance penalty. The Working Group studied an earlier Sun proposal, producing a counter-proposal which was much simpler, more predictable, and which would eliminate the performance penalty on the Pentium. Sun decided to implement the key provision of the Numerics Working Group proposal in Java 1.2, which was released in the spring of 1999.

Tim Lindholm, Distinguished Engineer at Sun, one of the members of the original Java project, the author of The Java Virtual Machine Specification, and currently one of the architects of the Java 2 platform said:

Our best attempts led to a public proposal that we considered a bad compromise and were not happy with, but were resigned to. ... The counterproposal was both very sensitive to the spirit of Java and satisfactory as a solution for the performance problem. ... We are sure that we ended up with a better answer for [Java] 1.2, and arrived at it through more complete consideration of real issues, because of the efforts of the Numerics Working Group.

The working group also advised Sun on the specification of elementary functions in Java, which lead to improvements in Java 1.3 which was released in the fall of 1999. The Numerics Working Group has now began work on a series of formal Java Specification Requests for language extensions

Also this year, Roldan Pozo and Bruce Miller developed an interactive numerical benchmark to measure the performance of scientific codes on Java Virtual machines running various platforms. The SciMark 2.0 benchmark includes computational kernels for FFTs, SOR, Monte Carlo integration, sparse matrix multiply, and dense LU factorization, comprising a representative set of computational styles commonly found in numeric applications. Several of SciMark's kernels have been adopted by the benchmarking effort of the Java Grande Forum.

SciMark can be run interactively from Web browsers, or can be downloaded and compiled for stand-alone Java platforms. Full source code is provided. The SciMark 2.0 result is recorded as megaflop rates for the numerical kernels, as well as an aggregate score for the complete benchmark. The current database lists results for over 800 computational platforms, from laptops to high-end servers. As Of January 2000, the record for SciMark 2.0 is over 76 Mflops. We are in the process of adding full applications to expand the SciMark suite.

Finally, G. W. Stewart released the first version of Jampack, a Java package for numerical linear algebra. Jampack provides an alternative design to the JAMA package issued by the MathWorks and NIST last year. While JAMA is designed for the non-expert user, Jampack provides a variety of facilities of interests to experts and others who may want to extend the package. In addition, it supports complex matrices.

 

JazzNet: Cost-Effective Parallel Computing

Roldan Pozo
William Mitchell

http://math.nist.gov/jazznet/

Several years ago, NIST was among some of the first institutions looking into low-cost parallel computing using commodity parts and operating systems. We built several PC clusters using the Linux operating system and fast-ethernet and Myrinet networking technologies. We put real applications on these machines and studied performance/cost trade-offs. The goal was to demonstrate to industry that such configurations were practical computing solutions, not just of interest to the computer science research community. Today, Linux clusters are not only commonplace in industry, but have actually become the dominant product being offered by several hardware vendors.

In conjunction with this effort, William Mitchell has been investigating the best software environments to utilize these architectures. Currently, he has evaluated nearly every Fortran 90/95 Linux compiler available and has conducted extensive benchmarking, reliability, completeness, and cost analysis.

More information on the JazzNet Linux cluster, applications, and available software is available at the project website.

 

Parallel Adaptive Refinement and Multigrid Finite Element Methods

William Mitchell

http://math.nist.gov/phaml/

Finite element methods using adaptive refinement and multigrid techniques have been shown to be very efficient for solving partial differential equations on sequential computers.  Adaptive refinement reduces the number of grid points by concentrating the grid in the areas where the action is, and multigrid methods solve the resulting linear systems in an optimal number of operations.  W. Mitchell has been developing a code, PHAML, to apply these methods on parallel computers.  The expertise and software developed in this project are useful for many NIST laboratory programs, including material design, semiconductor device simulation, and the quantum physics of matter.

Much of the advances this year was in the grid-partitioning algorithm.  An adaptively refined grid must be partitioned for distribution over the processors in such a way that the processor load is balanced and communication between processors is minimized.  Mitchell has developed the K-Way Refinement Tree (RTK) partitioning method to quickly find a high quality partition by using information contained in a tree representation of the refinement process.

This work has lead to a collaborative effort with Sandia National Laboratories to develop Zoltan, a dynamic load-balancing library.  Mitchell has designed and implemented a Fortran interface for the C library, and contributed the RTK method.  PHAML has been modified to (optionally) use Zoltan as the grid partitioner, providing an application testbed to compare different load balancing methods.  In addition, PHAML has been enhanced to solve a larger class of problems by adding the capabilities of non-constant coefficients, general boundary conditions, time dependence, nonlinearity, and coupled systems. These allow it to be used to solve application problems in collaboration with NIST scientists.

 

Sparse BLAS Standardization

Roldan Pozo

http://math.nist.gov/spblas/
http://www.netlib.org/utk/papers/blast-forum.html

NIST is playing a leading role in the new standardization effort for the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) kernels for computational linear algebra. The BLAS Technical Forum (BLAST) is coordinating this work. BLAST is an international consortium of industry, academia, and government institutions, including Intel, IBM, Sun, HP, Compaq/Digital, SGI/Cray, Lucent, Visual Numerics, and NAG.

One of the most anticipated components of the new BLAS standard is support for sparse matrix computations. Roldan Pozo chairs the Sparse BLAS subcommittee. NIST was first to develop and release a public domain reference implementations for early versions of the standard, which has helped shape the proposal which released for public review this year.

 

Support of the NIST Computing Environment

R. Boisvert
J. Conlon
W. Mitchell
(Division Staff)

Division staff members continue to contribute to the high quality scientific computing environment for NIST scientists and engineers via short-term consulting related to mathematics, algorithms and software, and by the support of software libraries on central systems. Division staff maintains a variety of research-grade public-domain math software libraries on the NIST Central Computers (SGI Origins, IBM SP2), as well as for NFS mounting by individual workstations. Among the libraries supported are the NIST Core Math Library (CMLIB), the SLATEC library, the NIST Standards Time Series and Regression Package (STARPAC), and LAPACK. These libraries, as well as a variety of commercial libraries implemented on NIST central systems, are cross-indexed for ease of discovery by NIST staff in the Guide to Available Mathematical Software, along with many other such resources, by MCSD.

This year, we continued our efforts to implementing these libraries on the new NIST SGI Origin 2000 systems (in most cases many versions of the libraries are maintained to support a variety of compilation modes). We also migrated our implementations of CMLIB and LAPACK to ITLs centralized software checkout service to ease the process of mounting libraries on workstations distributed throughout the Institute. This work is supported by the ITL High Performance Systems and Services Division.

 

TNT: Object Oriented Numerical Programming

Roldan Pozo

http://math.nist.gov/tnt/

NIST has a history of developing some of the most visible object-oriented linear algebra libraries , including Lapack++, Iterative Methods Library (IML++), Sparse Matrix Library (SparseLib++), Matrix/Vector Library (MV++), and most recently the Template Numerical Toolkit (TNT).

TNT incorporates many of the ideas we have explored with previous designs, and includes new techniques that were difficult to support before the ANSI C++ standardization. The library includes support for both C and Fortran array layouts, array sections, basic linear algebra algorithms (LU, Cholesky, QR, and eigenvalues) as well as primitive support for sparse matrices.

TNT has enjoyed several thousand downloads and is currently in use in several industrial applications.

 

Optimization and Computational Geometry Group

 

Computing the Partition Function


Isabel Beichl
Dianne O'Leary
Francis Sullivan (IDA Center for Computing Sciences)

A central issue in statistical physics is that of evaluating the partition function which describes the probability distribution of states of some system of interest. In a number of important settings, including the Ising model, the q-state Potts model, and the monomer-dimer model, no closed form expressions are known for three-dimensional cases. In addition, obtaining exact solutions of the problems is known to be computationally intractable.

At NIST, related problems occur in the materials science theory group, the combinatorial chemistry working group, and, in physics, models for the Bose-Einstein condensate can be formulated as a dimer problem. 

Many of these computations can be formulated as combinatorial counting problems for which the Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) method can be formulated to give approximate solutions. In some cases, the Markov Chain is rapidly mixing so that, in principle at least, a pre-specified arbitrary accuracy can be obtained in only a polynomial number of steps. In practice, however, the wall-clock computing time is prohibitively long and hardware bounds on precision can limit accuracy for native mode arithmetic.

A class of probabilistic importance sampling methods has been developed for these problems that appears to be much more effective than the standard MCMC technique for attacking these problems. The key to the approach is the use non-linear iterative methods, such as Sinkhorn balancing, to construct an extremely accurate importance function. Because importance sampling gives unbiased estimates, the importance function can be adjusted so that the simulation spends more time in the more complex regions of state space.

Recent accomplishments include the following.

 

Terrain Modeling

Christoph Witzgall
Javier Bernal
Marjorie McClain
William Stone (BFRL)
G. Choek (BFRL)
Robert Lipman (BFRL)
David Gilsinn (MEL)
J. Lavery (ARO)

Since 1986, C. Witzgall, J. Bernal, and M. McClain, with Witzgall as project leader, have investigated, implemented, and disseminated methods for representing terrain by triangulated surfaces or "TINs" (= Triangulated Irregular Networks). The work utilizes Delaunay triangulations and variations thereof. Part of this work has been supported by the Army Corps of Engineers and by DARPA.

Current work for the Topographic Engineering Laboratory (TEC) of the Army Corps of Engineers is to document editing and "thinning" methods for hydrographic data and corresponding surface generation. Emphasis is on defining the boundaries of sets of data points and identifying areas of missing data.

In 1999, collaboration started with NIST BFRL on applying TIN techniques to LIDAR scans of construction/excavation sites. Such scanning technology is being considered as a component of systems for automatically monitoring construction progress. Witzgall and Bernal are co-authors, together with lead author G.S. Cheok, R.R. Lipman, and W.C. Stone, of the forthcoming "NIST Construction Automation Program Report No. 4: Non-Intrusive Scanning Technology for Construction Status Determination". The challenges encountered were noise abatement and the combination of scan data taken from different viewpoints.

Witzgall is experimenting with methods for screening and filtering noisy scan data and subsequent numerical "registration (coordinate adjustment) for improved coincidence of separate data collections.

It also became apparent that filtering and surface generation should be undertaken in terms of the separate polar coordinate systems centered at the respective scanner locations rather than forming the union of separate data clouds and filtering that combination prior to representing the combined data set by a surface. There is furthermore a need to extend TIN techniques to surfaces which are not "elevated", that is, have a one-to-one projection into a footprint plane, since some surfaces on construction sites can be expected to fall into a more general category. Both of the above tasks require the ability to manipulate and intersect general triangulated surfaces in space. Bernal is developing algorithms for such manipulation based on "tetrahedralization" of data points in space. That technique is also capable of identifying spatial "cut" and "fill" regions and their volumes as defined by the intersection of the prevailing "terrain surface" with a planned "design surface". It is felt that tetrahedralization techniques will attract increasing attention because of their ability to represent proximity relationships in space.

In a separate development, Witzgall and D. Gilsinn (NIST MEL), are collaborating with J. Lavery of the Army Research Office, Durham, about applications to terrain modeling of the nonoscillatory splines pioneered by Lavery.

 

Part III

Activity Data

 

A collection of windows from
the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions

A collection of windows from the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions.

 

Publications

Appeared

  1. B. K. Alpert, "Hybrid Gauss-Trapezoidal Quadrature Rules," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 20 (1999), pp. 1551-1584.
  2. I. Beichl and F. Sullivan, "Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later," IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1999), pp. 59-62.
  3. I. Beichl and F. Sullivan, "The Importance of Importance Sampling," IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 71-73.
  4. I. Beichl and F. Sullivan, "Approximating the Permanent via Importance Sampling with Application to the Dimer Covering Problem," Journal of Computational Physics 149 (1999), pp. 128-147.
  5. J. Bernal, "Lexicographical Manipulations for Correctly Computing Regular Tetrahedralizations with Incremental Topological Flipping," NISTIR 6335, June 1999.
  6. J. Bernal and C. Witzgall, "Triangulation-Based L1-Fitting of Terrain Surfaces," NISTIR 6346, June 1999.
  7. P. T. Boggs, A. J. Kearsley, and J. Tolle, "A Practical Algorithm for General Large Scale Nonlinear Optimization Problems," SIAM Journal on Optimization 9 (1999), pp. 755-778.
  8. R. F. Boisvert, J. J. Dongarra, R. Pozo, K. A. Remington, G. W. Stewart, "Developing numerical libraries in Java," Concurrency; Practice and Experience 10 (1998), pp. 1117-1129.
  9. E. A. Bradley, A. A. O'Gallagher, and J. E. Rogers, "Global Solutions for Nonlinear Systems Using Qualitative Reasoning," in Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 23 (1998), pp. 211-228.
  10. W. C. Carter, S. A. Langer, and E.R Fuller, "The OOF Manual, version 1.0," NISTIR 6256, 1998.
  11. J. Cahn, S. Han, and G. McFadden, "Anisotropy of Interfaces in an Ordered HCP Binary Alloy," Journal of Statistical Physics 95 (1999), pp. 1337-1360.
  12. A. Carasso, "Linear and Nonlinear Image Deblurring: A Documented Study," SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, 36 (1999), pp. 1659-1689
  13. L. Cook, W. Greenwood, A. Kearsley and W. Wong-Ng, "Primary Phase Field of the Pb-doped 2223 High Tc Superconductor in the (Bi,Pb)-Sr-Ca-Cu-O System," NIST Journal of NIST Research, 104 (1999), pp. 277-289.
  14. S. Coriell, G. McFadden, and R. Sekerka, "Selection Mechanisms for Multiple Similarity Solutions for Solidification and Freezing," Journal of Crystal Growth 200 (1999), pp. 276-286.
  15. S. Coriell, B. Murray, A. Chernov and G. McFadden, "The Effect of a Shear Flow on the Morphological Stability of a Vicinal Face: Growth from a Supersaturated Solution," Advances in Space Research 22 (1998) 1153-1158.
  16. M. A. Davies, T. J. Burns, and C. J. Evans, "The dynamics of material flow in machining," Proceedings of the CIRP International Workshop on Modeling of Machining Operations, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, May 19, 1998, pp. 317-325.
  17. M. J. Donahue and D. G. Porter, "OOMMF User's Guide, Version 1.0," NISTIR 6376 Sept. 1999.
  18. B. Fabijonas and F. W. J. Olver, "On the Reversion of an Asymptotic Expansion and the Zeros of the Airy Functions," SIAM Review 41 (1999), pp. 762-773.
  19. H. P. Grimm, S. H. Davis, and G. B. McFadden, "Kinetic Anisotropy and Long Waves," Physical Review B 59 (1999), pp. 5629-5640.
  20. M. A. Hamstad, J. Gary and A. O'Gallagher, "Wideband Acoustic Emission Displacement Signals as a Function of Source Rise-Time and Plate Thickness," Journal of Acoustic Emission 16 (Jan.-Dec. 1998), pp. S251-S260.
  21. C-H. Hsueh, J. A. Haynes, M. J. Lance, P. F. Becher, M. K. Ferber, E. R. Fuller Jr., S. A. Langer, W. C. Carter, and W. R. Cannon, "Effects of Interface Roughness on Residual Stresses in Thermal Barrier Coatings," Journal of the American Ceramics Society 82 (1999), p. 1073.
  22. A. Kearsley, J. Macias, and D. Stephenson, "Definition of a Suitable Basic Reference State for the Use in Anomaly Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Climate Models," Applied Mathematics Letters 12 (1999), pp. 21--24.
  23. M. Lapena, S. C. Glotzer, S. A. Langer, and A. J. Liu, "Effect of Ordering on Spinodal Decomposition of Liquid-Crystal/Polymer Mixtures," Physical Review E 60 (1999), R29.
  24. D. W. Lozier, B. R. Miller, and B. V. Saunders, "Digital Mathematical Libraries for Science, Technology and Education," Proceedings of IEEE Advances in Digital Libraries Conference, Baltimore, MD, May 1999. Also published as NISTIR 6297.
  25. M. McClain and C. Witzgall, "Surface Energy Formula for a Hsieh-Clough-Tocher Element," NISTIR 6246, January 1999.
  26. G. McFadden, Introduction to "A Microscopic Theory of Domain Wall Motion and Its Experimental Verification in Fe-Al Alloy Domain Growth Kinetics,'" by J. Cahn and S. Allen, in The Selected Works of John W. Cahn, edited by W. Craig Carter and William C. Johnson (TMS, Warrendale, PA, 1998), pp. 369-372.
  27. R. D. McMichael, M. J. Donahue, D. G. Porter and J. Eicke, "Comparison of Magnetostatic Field Calculation Methods on 2-D Square Grids as Applied to a Micromagnetic Standard Problem," Journal of Applied Physics 85 (1999), 5816-5818.
  28. W. F. Mitchell, review of "Programming the Finite Element Method," Third Edition by I. M. Smith and D.V. Griffiths, SIAM Review 41 (1999), p. 620.
  29. W. F. Mitchell, "The Fortran 90 Bindings for OpenGL," ACM Fortran Forum (18) 1, 1999, pp. 5-13.
  30. W. F. Mitchell, "A Comparison of Three Fast Repartition Methods for Adaptive Grids," Proceedings of the Ninth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, March 1999.
  31. D. Sterling, H. Dullin, and J. Meiss, "Homoclinic Bifurcations for the Henon Map," Physica D 134, 1999, pp. 153-184.
  32. D. Williams and B. Alpert, "Characteristic Impedance, Power, and Causality," IEEE Microwave and Guided Wave Letters 9, 181-182 (1999).

Accepted

  1. B. Alpert, L. Greengard, and T. Hagstrom, "Rapid Evaluation of Nonreflecting Boundary Kernels for Time-Domain Wave Propagation," SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.
  2. D. Anderson, W. Boettinger, G. McFadden, and A. Wheeler, "A Phase-Field Model of Solidification with Convection," Physica D.
  3. W. Boettinger, S. Coriell, C. Campbell, and G. McFadden, "On the Properties of Alpha/Alpha + Beta Diffusion Couples," Acta Materialia.
  4. P. Boggs, A. Kearsley, and J. Tolle, "A Global Convergence Analysis of an Algorithm for General Large Scale Nonlinearly Constrained  Optimization Problems," SIAM Journal on Optimization.
  5. T. J. Burns, R. W. Davis, and E. F. Moore, "A Perturbation Study of Particle Dynamics in a Plane Wake Flow," Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
  6. H. Dullin, J. Meiss and D. Sterling, "Generic Twistless Bifurcations," Nonlinearity.
  7. F. Hunt, "Attractors, Chain Transitive Sets and Invariant Measures" Proceedings of Equadiff '99 Conference in Differential Equations.
  8. A. J. Kearsley, P. T. Boggs, and J. W. Tolle, "A Practical Algorithm for General Large Scale Nonlinear Optimization Problems," SIAM Journal on Optimization.
  9. A. J. Kearsley and M. S. Gockenbach, "Optimal Signal Sets for Non-Gaussian Detectors," SIAM Journal on Optimization.
  10. A. J. Kearsley, P. T. Boggs, and J. W. Tolle, "A Global Convergence Analysis of an Algorithm for Large Scale Nonlinearly Constrained Optimization Problems," SIAM Journal on Optimization.
  11. S. A. Langer and A. J. Liu, "Sheared Foam as a Supercooled Liquid?" Europhysics Letters.
  12. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Classical Special Functions," Proceedings of the International Workshop in Special Functions, June 21-25, 1999, Hong Kong.
  13. G. P. McCormick and C. Witzgall, "Limits of SUMT Trajectories in Convex Programming," Journal of Mathematical Programming.
  14. G. McFadden, S. Coriell, and R. Sekerka, "Analytic Solution for a Non-Axisymmetric Isothermal Dendrite," Journal of Crystal Growth, in press.
  15. F. Williams, J. E. Rogers, and C. L. Holloway, "Multiconductor Transmission Line Characterization: Representations, Approximations, and Accuracy," IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.


Submitted

  1. B. Alpert, G. Beylkin, D. Gines, and L. Vozovoi "Adaptive Solution of Partial Differential Equations in Multiwavelet Bases," SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.
  2. I. Beichl and F. Sullivan, "The Metropolis Algorithm," IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering
  3. L. Cook, W. Greenwood, A. Kearsley, and W. Wong-Ng, "Effect of Ag on the Primary Phase Field of High Tc (Bi,Pb)-2223 Superconductor" Journal of Material Research.
  4. M. A. Davies, J. R. Pratt, B. Dutterer, and T. J. Burns, "Interrupted Machining - A Doubling in the Number of Stability Lobes? Part 1: Theoretical Development," Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering.
  5. M. J. Donahue, D. G. Porter, R. D. McMichael, and J. Eicke, "Behavior of muMag Standard Problem No. 2 in the Small Particle Limit," Journal of Applied Physics.
  6. C. H. Hsueh, P. F. Becher, E. R. Fuller, Jr., S. A. Langer, W. C. Carter, "Surface-Roughness Induced Residual Stresses in Thermal Barrier Coatings: Computer Simulations," submitted to Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium of Functionally Graded Materials, FGM'98.
  7. G. McFadden, A. Wheeler, and D. Anderson, "Isothermal Asymptotics for a Phase-Field Model of a Pure Material," Physica D.
  8. G. McFadden, S. Coriell, and R. Sekerka, "Shape Parameter for a Non-Axisymmetric Isothermal Dendrite," Journal of Crystal Growth.
  9. R. D. McMichael, M. J. Donahue, D. G. Porter, J. Eicke, "Domain Wall Traps for Low-Field Switching of Sub-Micron Elements," Journal of Applied Physics.
  10. W. F. Mitchell, "A Comparison of Fortran 90 Compilers for Linux PCs," NISTIR.
  11. W. F. Mitchell, "The K-way Refinement Tree Partitioning Method for Adaptive Grids," Parallel Computing.
  12. S. E. Russek, S. Kaka, M. J. Donahue and D. G. Porter, "Simulation of the Dynamical Switching of Sub-micrometer GMR Devices for MRAM Applications," Journal of Applied Physics.
  13. B. Rust, "Truncating the Singular Value Decomposition for Ill-Posed Problems," SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.
  14. B. Saunders and Qiming Wang, "Using Numerical Grid Generation to Facilitate 3D Visualization of Complicated Mathematical Functions," NISTIR.
  15. Q. Wang and B. Saunders, "Interactive 3D Visualization of Mathematical Functions Using VRML," Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 1999, San Francisco, CA, October 24-29, 1999. Also published as NISTIR 6289.
  16. D. Williams and B. Alpert, "Causality and Waveguide Circuit Theory," IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.


In Process

  1. B. Alpert, L. Greengard, and T. Hagstrom, "An Integral Evolution Formula for the Wave Equation."
  2. I. Beichl and F. Sullivan, "Computing the partition function for the cubic monomer-dimer system."
  3. R. Braun, J. Zhang, J. Cahn, G. McFadden, and A. Wheeler, "Multiple-Order-Parameter Theory with a Model Phase Diagram for an FCC Alloy."
  4. T. J. Burns and M. A. Davies, "On Repeated Adiabatic Shear Band Formation during High-Speed Machining," for a special issue of the International Journal of Plasticity.
  5. M. A. Davies and T. J. Burns, "Thermo-Mechanical Oscillations in Material Flow during High-Speed Machining," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A.
  6. M. A. Davies, J. R. Pratt, B. Dutterer, and T. J. Burns, "Interrupted Machining A Doubling in the Number of Stability Lobes? Part 2: Numerical Simulation and Experiment," to be submitted to The Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering.
  7. M. A. Davies and T. J. Burns, "Thermo-Mechanical Oscillations in Material Flow during High-Speed Machining," for a special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
  8. M. J. Donahue, "Magnetization Behavior of Single Domain Particles."
  9. B. R. Fabijonas, D. W. Lozier and F. W. J. Olver, "Subroutines for Evaluating the Airy and Scorer Functions for Complex Arguments."
  10. B. R. Fabijonas, D. W. Lozier and F. W. J. Olver, "Reference Software for the Computation of Airy and Scorer Functions."
  11. J. Gary, M. Hamstad, and A. O'Gallagher, "Modeling of Buried Acoustic Emission Monopole and Dipole Sources with a Finite Element Technique."
  12. M. Hamstad, A. O'Gallagher, and J. Gary, "Modeling of Buried Acoustic Emission Monopole and Dipole Sources With a Finite Element Technique." 
  13. A. Kearsley, "A Matrix Free Algorithm for Quadratic Programming Problems."
  14. A. Kearsley, "Numerical Results for Located Optimal Signal Sets for Non-Gaussian Detectors."
  15. A. Kearsley, "An Infeasible Point Method for Image Deblurring."
  16. E. Kim and G. McFadden, "The Effect of Anisotropic Surface Diffusion on the Pinch-Off of an Axisymmetric Rod."
  17. J. Lawrence and C. Witzgall, "A Paradigm for Homothetic Inscription."
  18. J. Lawrence and C. Witzgall, "A Superadditive Function for Triangle Partitions."
  19. R. D. McMichael, J. Eicke, M. J. Donahue, and D. G. Porter, "Element Shaping for Reduced Switching Field."
  20. W. F. Mitchell, "Approaches to Parallel Multigrid with the Full Domain Partition," Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis special issue for the Proceedings of the 1999 Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods.
  21. B. Murray, S. Coriell, G. McFadden, and A. Chernov, "The Effect of Oscillatory Shear Flow on Step Bunching."
  22. J. E. Rogers, J. J. Filliben, L. M. Gill, W. Guthrie, E. Lagergren, M. G. Vangel, "StRD: Statistical Reference Datasets for Assessing the Numerical Accuracy of Statistical Software," National Institute of Standards and Technology NISTTN 1396.
  23. B. Rust and J. R. Lowney, "Correcting for Beam Broadening in Scanning Electron Microscopy."
  24. B. Rust and D. OLeary, "FORTRAN Subroutines for Computing Nonnegatively Constrained Confidence Interval Estimates for Ill-Posed Problems."
  25. B. Al Sunaidi, A.M. Lapena, S.C. Glotzer, S. A. Langer, and A. J. Liu, "Domain Growth Kinetics in a Phase Separating Polymer/Liquid Crystal Mixture."
  26. S. Tewari, D. Schiemann, D. J. Durian, C.M. Knobler, S. A. Langer, and A. J. Liu, "Statistics of Shear-induced Rearrangements in a Model Foam."
  27. J. Willis, F. Sabina, G. McFadden, and E. Drescher-Krasicka, "Acoustic Microscopy of Stress. I. Longitudinal Mode."

 

Presentations

Invited Talks

  1. B. Alpert, "Nonreflecting Boundary Kernels and Novel Representations of Classical Sturm-Liouville Eigenfunctions," Computational Harmonic Analysis Seminar, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder, March 10, 1999.
  2. I. Beichl, "Solving the dimer-covering problem in 3D," Catholic University, November 4, 1998.
  3. I. Beichl, "Solving the dimer-covering problem in 3D," NIST MSEL Seminar Series, January 26, 1999.
  4. I. Beichl, "Solving the dimer-covering problem in 3D," Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, February 5, 1999.
  5. I. Beichl, "Olga Taussky Todd at NBS," Olga Taussky Todd Symposium, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA, July 1999.
  6. R. Boisvert, "Report of the Java Grande Numerics Working Group," SC 98, Orlando, FL, November 1998.
  7. R. Boisvert, "Numerical Computing in Java," University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, July 2, 1999.
  8. T. Burns, "Bifurcation in material flow during high-speed metal cutting," Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, January 27, 1999.
  9. T. Burns, "On Repeated Adiabatic Shear Band Formation during High-Speed Machining;" 1999 ASME Mechanics and Materials Conference, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, June 27, 1999.
  10. A Carasso, "Reconstructing the Past: Logarithmic Convexity and the Slow Evolution Constraint in Ill-Posed Initial Value Problems," Applied Mathematics Seminar, University of Delaware, Dec. 4, 1998.
  11. A. Carasso, "Levy Stable Densities, Image Deblurring, and Time Reversed Diffusion Equations," University of Minnesota's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Colloquium, on January 14, 1999.
  12. A. Carasso, "Linear and Nonlinear Image Deblurring," University of New Mexico Workshop on "Fundamental Issues in Image Formation, Detection, and Processing," February 6, 1999.
  13. M. J. Donahue, "Development of a Micromagnetic Public Code," Second International Symposium on Hysteresis Modeling and Micromagnetism, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy, 7-June-1999.
  14. F. Hunt, "Altractors, Chain Transitive Sets and Invariant Measures," SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, May 1999.
  15. F. Hunt, "Peano Curves and Fractal Dimension," Miami University of Ohio, June 16, 1999.
  16. F. Hunt, "A Mathematician at NIST Today," Olga Taussky Todd Symposium, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA July 1999.
  17. F. Hunt, "Fractal Dimensions, Ergodic Theory and a Peano-like Curve," Miami University of Ohio, Summer Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, July 1999.
  18. F. Hunt, "Attractors, Chain Transitive sets and Invariant Measures," Equadiff99 Conference on Differential Equations, August 1999.
  19. A. Kearsley, "Wireless in Seattle," PECASE Awards Ceremony, NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, February 10, 1999.
  20. A. Kearsley, "Sequential Quadratic Programming and Wireless Communications," Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, May 1999.
  21. A. Kearsley, "Fine Tuning Signal Sets for Noise Models," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, June, 1999.
  22. A. Kearsley, "Numerical Algorithms for Confirmation from Distances," University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, June, 1999.
  23. S. Langer, "Sheared Foam, Jamming, and Supercooled Liquids," Condensed Matter Physics Seminar, Johns Hopkins University, Oct. 21, 1998.
  24. S. Langer, "Overview of OOF," Functionally Graded Materials Meeting, MSEL, NIST, Oct. 22, 1998.
  25. S. Langer, "OOF: Object Oriented Finite Element Analysis of Real Microstructures," Digital Materials Seminar, Cornell University, July 6, 1999.
  26. S. Langer, "OOF: Object Oriented Finite Element Software for Material Microstructure," Fifth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics, Boulder, CO, August 5, 1999.
  27. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," Aizu University, Japan, June 15, 1999;
  28. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," Kyoto University, Japan, June 17, 1999;
  29. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," Nagoya University, Japan, June 18, 1999;
  30. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," International Workshop on Special Functions, City University of Hong Kong, June 21, 1999.
  31. G. McFadden, "A Phase-Field Model of the Rapid Solidification of a Binary Alloy," Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota Workshop on "Nonlinear PDE and Applications to Materials," April 30 - May 2, 1999.
  32. G. McFadden, "Diffuse Interface Models of Order-Disorder Transitions in a Binary Alloy," Interfaces for the 21st Century, Monterey, California, August 18, 1999.
  33. W. F. Mitchell, "Full Domain Partitions to Reduce Communication in Parallel PDE Solvers," University of Maryland, College Park, MD, March 11, 1999.
  34. W. F. Mitchell, "Parallelization of Adaptive Multilevel Methods," University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, three lectures, June 7-9, 1999.
  35. D. Porter and R. Boisvert, "Establishing Virtual Communities: Mathematics and Modeling," DARPA/NIST Network Simulation Validation Workshop, May 25, 1999.
  36. R. Pozo, "Java Numerics: Performance and Portability Issues," Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computing, Annapolis, February 25, 1999.
  37. R. Pozo, "Sparse BLAS," BLAS Technical Forum, Oak Ridge, TN, March 16, 1999.
  38. R. Pozo, "Optimization Strategies for Java Scientific Computing," Celera Genomics, Rockville, MD, April 2, 1999.
  39. R. Pozo, "Java Numerics and High Performance Computing," panel discussion, JavaOne Conference, San Francisco, June 17, 1999.
  40. C. Witzgall, "TIN What and What For?" Digital Terrain Elevation Data [Dted] Technical Exchange Meeting [TEM] sponsored by NIMA, March 23, 1999.

Conference Presentations

  1. B. Alpert, "Rapid Evaluation of Exact Nonreflecting Boundary Conditions," in minisymposium, "Advances in Numerical Methods for Wave Propagation," International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 7, 1999.
  2. R. Boisvert, "Numerical Computing in Java," International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 7, 1999.
  3. T. Burns, "Singular Poincare-Andronov-Hopf Bifurcation to Relaxation Oscillations during High-Speed Metal Cutting," Fifth SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, Snowbird, Utah, May 23, 1999.
  4. F. Hunt, "Images Rendered with NEFDS Data and Other Developments," SIGGRAPH99, Los Angeles, CA, Aug. 1-7, 1999.
  5. A. Kearsley, "An Algorithm for Large Scale Quadratic Programming Problems," SIAM Optimization Conference, Atlanta, GA, May 1999.
  6. S. A. Langer, "Velocity Fluctuations in a Sheared Liquid Foam," American Physical Society Meeting, Atlanta, GA, March 23, 1999.
  7. D. W. Lozier, "Digital Library of Mathematical Functions," Sigma Xi Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, November 14, 1998.
  8. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," SIAM Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, May 13, 1999;
  9. D. W. Lozier, "The DLMF Project: A New Initiative in Special Functions," Fourth International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 7, 1999.
  10. G. McFadden, "A Phase-Field Model of the Rapid Solidification of a Binary Alloy," 11th American Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy, Tuscon, Arizona, August 2, 1999.
  11. W. F. Mitchell, "A Comparison of Three Fast Repartition Methods for Adaptive Grids," Ninth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, March 22, 1999.
  12. W. F. Mitchell, "Approaches to Parallel Multigrid with the Full Domain Partition," Ninth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, March 22, 1999.
  13. W. F. Mitchell, "Approaches to Parallel Multigrid with the Full Domain Partition," Ninth Copper Mountain Conference of Multigrid Methods, Copper Mountain, CO, April 1999.
  14. W. F. Mitchell, "Coarse Grain Parallel Adaptive Multilevel Methods," Workshop on Fast Solvers for Partial Differential Equation, Oberwolfach, Germany, June 1999.
  15. W. F. Mitchell, "The Full Domain Partition Method," Scalable Linear Solvers Workshop '99, June 1999.
  16. W. F. Mitchell, "Parallel Adaptive Finite Elements with the Full Domain Partition," Fifth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics, Boulder, CO, August 5, 1999.
  17. R. Pozo, "Proposal Update for the Sparse BLAS Standard," BLAS Technical Forum, University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1998
  18. R. Pozo, SciMark2 benchmark (poster), ACM Java Grande Conference, San Francisco, CA, July 16, 1999.
  19. B. Saunders, "3D Visualization of Mathematical Functions Using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language," MD-DC-VA section meeting of Mathematical Association of America (MAA), James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, April 9-10, 1999.

 

Conferences, Workshops and Lecture Series

Shortcourses

  1. Isabel Beichl, "Non-numerical Methods for Scientific Computing", NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, Spring 1999.
  2. William Mitchell, Fortran 90 for Scientists and Engineers", NIST, Boulder, CO, Spring 1999.

MCSD Seminar Series

  1. Steve Langer (MCSD), "Sheared Foam, Temperature, Jamming, and Supercooled Liquids", October 20, 1998.
  2. Alfred Carasso (MCSD), "Logarithmic Convexity and the Slow Evolution Constraint in Ill-posed Initial Value Problems", November 3, 1998.
  3. Bert Rust (MCSD), "Solution Diagnostics and the Singular Value Decomposition for Ill-posed Problems", November 17, 1998
  4. Gary Knott (Civilized Software), "Parameter Estimation with Differential-Equation Models and Other Models in Chemistry", December 1, 1998.
  5. Bill Carlson (IDA Center for Computing Sciences), "RES: a Simple System for Distributed Computing", December 3, 1998.
  6. David G. Sterling (MCSD), "Periodic Motions and the Anti-Integrable Limit in Discrete Dynamical Systems", December 22, 1998.
  7. Tepper L. Gill (Howard University), "What's New in Electromagnetics", March 9, 1999.
  8. John Lavery (Army Research Office), "Nonoscillatory Splines: Shape preserving, Multiresolution, Piecewise-polynomial Geometric Modeling", March 30, 1999.
  9. G. W. Stewart (MCSD and the University of Maryland), "Jampack: A Java Matrix Package", April 21, 1999.
  10. Honghui Wan (National Institutes of Health), "Axiomatic Foundations of Complexity Functions of Biological Sequences", May 5, 1999.
  11. John J. Hillman (NASA Goddard), "Hyperspectral Imaging of Solar System Objects and Historical Artifacts", May 10, 1999.
  12. W. Saenz (Catholic University and NRL), "Lie-Series Approach to the Quantum Mechanical Evolution of Resonant and Nonresonant Anharmonic Oscillators", May 18, 1999.
  13. Barna L. Bihari (Rockwell Science Center), "Multiresolution Schemes for the Numerical Solution of Conservation Laws", July 19, 1999.
  14. David J. Eyre (University of Utah), "Cascades of Instability in the Solutions of Vector-valued Cahn-Hilliard Equations", July 20, 1999.
  15. Andrew Dienstfrey (New York University), "Data Analysis of FTIR Spectroscopy", July 21, 1999.
  16. Bonita Saunders (MCSD), "The Role of Graphics and Visualization in the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions", September 14, 1999.
  17. Piotr Biler (University of Wroc, Poland), "Nonlinear Models with Anomalous Diffusion", September 16, 1999.
  18. Roldan Pozo, "High Performance Java for Scientific Computing", September 15, 1999 (Boulder).
  19. Samuel J. Lomonaco, Jr. (NIST ITL), "A Talk on Quantum Cryptography or How Alice Outwits Eve", September 21, 1999.
  20. Ronald Boisvert, "The Java Grande Forum: Making Java Better for Numerical Computing", October 19, 1999 (Boulder).
  21. Tony T. Warnock (Los Alamos National Laboratory), "Effective Error Estimates for Quasi-Monte-Carlo Computations", October 13, 1999.
  22. Alfred Carasso (MCSD), "Direct Blind Deconvolution", February 15, 2000.


DLMF Seminar Series

  1. Robert E. Turner (Science Applications International Corporation), "The Practical Use of the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions in the Industrial Environment", December 7, 1998.
  2. Charles F. Dunkl (University of Virginia), "Multi-Variable Orthogonal Polynomials: Applications and Computation", January 11, 1999.
  3. Walter Van Assche (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), "Some Examples of Multiple Orthogonal Polynomials", May 27, 1999.
  4. Adri Olde Daalhuis (University of Edinburgh), "Special Functions and Exponentially Improved Asymptotics", July 29, 1999.

Conference/Workshop Organization

  1. Isabel Beichl, Organizing Committee, The Olga Taussky Todd Celebration of Careers in Mathematics for Women, Berkeley, CA, July 16-18, 1999.
  2. R. Boisvert, Program Committee, 1999 ACM Java Grande Conference, San Francisco, CA, June 1999.
  3. R. Boisvert, Minisymposium Co-Organizer (with Anne Trefethen, NAG Ltd.), "Java for Numerical Computing", International Congress on Industrial and Applied mathematics, Edinburgh, UK, July, 1999.
  4. R. Boisvert, Organizer, Panel on Java for High Performance Computing, SC99, Portland, OR, November 1999.
  5. R. Boisvert, Program Committee, IFIP Working Conference on the Architecture of Scientific Software, Ottawa, Canada, October 2000.
  6. F. Hunt, Organizing Committee, Workshop onMetrology and Modeling of Color and Appearance, NIST, March 2000.
  7. G. McFadden, Organizing Committee, Interfaces for the 21st Century, Monterey, CA, August 1999.
  8. G. McFadden, Co-chair, Organizing Committee, Third SIAM Conference on Mathematical Aspects of Materials Science, Philadelphia, May 2000.
  9. MCSD, Co-sponsor, Workshop on Mathematical Problems in Industry, University of Delaware, June 7-11, 1999.
  10. R. Pozo, Minisymposium Co-organizer, "Java Numerics Issues", SIAM National Meeting, Atlanta, GA, May 14, 1999.
  11. R. Pozo, Program Committee, Workshop on Java for High Performance Computing, ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, Rhodes, Greece, June 19-20, 1999.
  12. R. Pozo, Program Committee, Third International Symposium on Computing in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments (ISCOPE 99), San Francisco, CA, December 1999.
  13. R. Pozo, Program Committee, 2000 ACM Java Grande Conference, San Francisco, CA, June 2000.

 

Software Released

  1. M. Donahue and D. Porter, OOMMF 1.0 beta 1 (Nov. 6, 1998), 1.0 beta 2 (July 27, 1999), 1.1 alpha 0 (Apr. 28, 1999), 1.1 alpha 1 (Aug. 10, 1999), http://math.nist.gov/oommf/. (The Object-Oriented Micromagnetic Framework includes a 2D micromagnetic solver engine, an interactive editor for micromagnetic problems, a vector field display application, a data graphing application, and several other support tools.)
  2. William F. Mitchell, f90gl Version 1.2, June 30, 1999, http://math.nist.gov/f90gl/. (A Fortran 90 interface for the graphics libraries of OpenGL, Mesa and GLUT.)
  3. S. Langer and E. Fuller, OOF, version 1.0, September 1998, http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~wcraig/oof/. (An Object-Oriented Finite element analysis program for modeling the microstructure of composite materials.)
  4. R. Pozo and B. Miller, SciMark Java benchmark, November 1998. (Measures numerical performance of Java Virtual Machine environments on common mathematical kernels.)
  5. R. Pozo and B. Miller, SciMark 2.0, May 14, 1999 and September 1999 http://math.nist.gov/scimark/.
  6. R. Pozo, Template Numerical Toolkit (TNT) version 0.9.1. This new version includes an improved LU factorization algorithm, together with several workarounds for non-ANSI C++ compilers. (The Template Numerical Toolkit collection of mathematical libraries for numerical computation in C++, which includes vectors, matrices, and multidimensional arrays.)

 

Electronic Resources Developed and Maintained

  1. GAMS, R. Boisvert, M. McClain and B. Miller, http://math.nist.gov/gams/. (The Guide to Available Mathematical Software is a cross-index and virtual repository of mathematical software components of use in computational science and engineering.)
  2. Java Numerics Web Pages, R. Boisvert, R. Pozo, and K. Remington, http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/. (A resource for information on numerical computing in Java and the home of the Java Grande Forum Numerics Working Group.)
  3. Matrix Market, R. Boisvert, B. Miller, R. Pozo and K. Remington, http://math.nist.gov/MatrixMarket/. (A visual database of matrix test data of use in comparative studies of algorithms.)
  4. Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, D. Lozier, R. Boisvert, C. Clark, M. McClain, B. Miller, F. Olver, B. Saunders, Q. Wang, http://math.nist.gov/DigitalMathLib/, early prototype, Oct. 1999. (The DLMF is an online resource of reference data related to mathematical functions.)

 

External Contacts

MCSD staff members enjoy many contacts with colleagues in industry, government, and academia. The purpose of such contacts is quite varied. In some cases, we are providing short-term consulting related to the R&D output of the division. In other cases, an external colleague is providing expertise by participating in a NIST project. The following is an (incomplete) list of institutions with which we have interacted recently.

Industrial Labs

Advanced Network Consultants, Inc.
ARACOR
Civilized Software
Compaq
Conoco
General Electric Corporate Research
General Pneumatics
GTE Speech and Language Research
Hewlett-Packard Labs
IBM Research
Interactive Software Services
ISCIENCES, Inc.
Lahey
Least Squares Software
LG Electronics
Lucent Technology
Maxtor Corporation
Merck Pharmaceuticals
Mobil Research
Moldyn, Inc.
Molecular Mining Corporation
MTS Systems Corp.
Numerical Algorithms Group
SAIC
Scriptics Corporation
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
SONIX, Inc.
Sun Microsystems
Texas Instruments
Tydeman Consulting
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR)
The MathWorks
United Technologies
Visual Numerics

Government / Non-profit Organizations

American Mathematical Society (AMS)
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Air Force Philips Laboratory
Army Corps of Engineers
Army Research Office
CWI Amsterdam
DARPA
IDA Center for Computing Sciences
Lawrence Berkeley Labs
Mathematics Association of America (MAA)
NASA
NASoftware, Ltd.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
National Science Foundation
NIH
NOAA
Oak Ridge National Labs
Russian Academy of Sciences
Sandia National Labs
San Diego Supercomputer Center
SIAM
Toronto Sunnybrook Cancer Center

Universities

Carnegie Mellon University
Drexel University
George Mason University
George Washington University
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Morgan State University
Moscow State University
New York University
Penn State University
Purdue University
SUNY Binghampton
Southampton University
Southern Methodist University
Stanford University
University of Bristol
University of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
University of Delaware
University of Karlsruhe
University of Kent at Canterbury
University of Marseille
University of Maryland
University of Minnesota
University of New Mexico
University of Oklahoma
University of Oregon
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Univ. of Texas Anderson Cancer Center
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin
University of Zaragoza
Vienna Institute of Technology
Washington University

 

Other Professional Activities

Internal

  1. Isabel Beichl serves on the NIST Diversity Board.
  2. R. Boisvert serves on the NIST Centennial Publications Committee.
  3. R. Boisvert serves on the Steering Committee for the NIST Combinatorial Methods Working Group.
  4. D. Lozier serves as Associate Editor of the NIST Journal of Research.
  5. D. Lozier served as the President of the NIST chapter of Sigma Xi.
  6. Staff members regularly review manuscripts for the Washington Editorial Review Board (WERB) and the Boulder Editorial Review Board (BERB).

External

  1. B. Alpert served as a site visitor evaluating research groups funded by the DARPA/NSF program on Optimized Portable Algorithms and Application Libraries (OPAAL).
  2. R. Boisvert serves on the ACM Publications Board.
  3. R. Boisvert serves as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software.
  4. R. Boisvert is a member of the IFIP Working Group 2.5 (Numerical Software).
  5. R. Boisvert and R. Pozo co-chair the Numerics Working Group of the Java Grande Forum.
  6. M. Donahue and D. Porter serve on the Steering Committee of the muMag Activity Group.
  7. D. Lozier serves as Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation.
  8. D. Lozer serves as Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions.
  9. F. Hunt serves on the Human Resources Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California.
  10. G. McFadden serves as Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics.
  11. G. McFadden serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Computational Physics.
  12. G. McFadden serves as Associate Editor for Interfaces and Free Boundaries.
  13. R. Pozo chairs the Sparse Subcommittee of the BLAS Technical Forum.
  14. B. Saunders serves as treasurer of the MD-DC-VA section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).
  15. B. Saunders serves on the Selection Committee for the John Smith Award for Distinquished College or University Teaching presented by the MD-DC-VA section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).
  16. Staff members have refereed articles for the following journals: ACM Transactions on Graphics, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Computing and Visualization, Computing in Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Interfaces and Free Boundaries, Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Journal of Crystal Growth, Parallel Computing, Physica B, Physical Review E, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Optimization, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM Review, Theoretical Computer Science.
  17. Staff members reviewed proposals for the following research programs: DOE, NSF KDI Program, NSF Materials Theory Program, NSF Minority Activity Program, NSF SBIR Program, and other NSF programs

 

Outreach Activities

MCSD staff members engage in a variety of activities designed to promote careers in mathematics and computational science. Among these are the following.

  1. Isabel Beichl served on a panel on Women in Mathematics at the Association for Women in Mathematics Meeting in January 1999.
  2. Isabel Beichl, Fern Hunt, and Bonita Saunders hosted a visit to NIST by students from the George Washington University Summer Program for Women on July 23, 1999.
  3. An interview with Ron Boisvert is featured in the "A Day in the Life of " website maintained by Crossroads, the ACM student publication. The site provides insight for students regarding careers in computer science.
  4. Ron Boisvert served as a judge for the Science Expo of the Neelsville Middle School in Gaithersburg.
  5. Tony Kearsley serves as a mentor for two African-American women graduate students through the SIAM Graduate Student Mentoring Program.
  6. Tony Kearsley co-organized (with Monica Matrinez-Carnales of Stanford) a DOE-sponsored session on "Simulation in Science and Engineering" which was videotaped for use in classroom settings to encourage women and under-represented minorities to study science.
  7. Fern Hunt and Bonita Saunders served on a panel on Mathematics in the Biological Sciences for Mathematics Awareness Month at Morgan State University in Baltimore in April 1999.
  8. Bonita Saunders submitted an update of her career profile for the second edition of the MAA publication 101 Careers in Mathematics.
  9. Bonita Saunders assisted a fourth grade teacher at Brown Station Elementary School in Gaithersburg in teaching math skills to underachieving students.
  10. Marjorie McClain serves as a math tutor for Gaithersburg High School.
  11. MCSD staff mentored student employees from the following institutions: Carnegie-Mellon University, Montgomery Blair High School, Montgomery College, and Quince Orchard High School.

 

External Funding

MCSD receives a variety of funding to supplement the base STRS allocation obtained from the NIST Information Technology Laboratory. Funding for fiscal year 1999 includes the following. (For joint funding, the amount shown is MCSDs portion.)

External to NIST

  1. B. Alpert (joint with NYU), Time Domain Modeling Algorithms, DARPA, $174K.
  2. R. Boisvert (joint with the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Bell Labs), Evolving Software Repositories, DARPA, $110K.
  3. G. McFadden (joint with NIST Materials Science and Engineering Lab), Investigation of Flow Effects during Directional Solidification and Dendritic Growth, NASA, $91K.
  4. W. Mitchell, Mesh Generation and Adaptive Refinement, Sandia National Laboratory, $60K.
  5. C. Witzgall, Thinning of Subaquatic Depth Measurements, Army Corps of Engineers, $32K.
  6. D. Lozier and B. Fabijonas (joint with the Russian Academy of Sciences), Numerical Software for Mathematical Special Functions, U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (CRDF), $11K.
  7. D. Lozier, F. Olver, C. Clark (PL), and R. Boisvert, Mathematical Foundations for a Networked Scientific Knowledge Base, National Science Foundation, $1300K (3-year funding).


Other NIST Programs

  1. D. Lozier and R. Boisvert, Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications Program, NIST Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, $100K.
  2. F. Hunt (joint with NIST Building and Fire Research Lab, NIST Physics Lab and NIST Manufacturing Engineering Lab), Advanced Methods and Models for Optical Reflectance and Scattering, NIST Competency Fund, $82K.
  3. D. Lozier and M. McClain, Adaptive Learning Module for Mathematical Functions, NIST Advanced Technology Program, $53K.
  4. Kearsley (joint with ITL Advanced Networking Technologies Division and the NIST Electronics and Electrical Engineering Lab), Wireless Communications, NIST Competency Fund, $51K.
  5. Alpert and A. OGallagher (joint with NIST Electronics and Electrical Engineering Lab and ITL High Performance Systems and Services Division), Rigorous Modeling of Optoelectronic Components for Manufacturing, NIST Advanced Technology Program, $48K.
  6. Witzgall (joint with ITL Statistical Engineering Division), Bayesian Statistics in Metrology, NIST Competency Fund, $41K.
  7. Lozier, Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, NIST Standard Reference Data Program, $40K.
  8. B. Miller and M. McClain, Life-cycle Energy and Water Conservation Software in Java, NIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory, $28K.
  9. T. Burns (joint with NIST Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory), Machining Process Metrology and Simulation, NIST Advanced Technology Program, $25K.
  10. G. McFadden (joint with NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory), Residual Stresses in Ceramic Materials, NIST Advanced Technology Program, $20K.


Other ITL Programs

  1. R. Boisvert et al., Math Software Support, ITL High Performance Systems and Services Division (Supercomputing Funding), $425K.
  2. J. Blue et al., Math Modeling Support, ITL High Performance Systems and Services Division (Supercomputing Funding), $300K.
  3. I. Beichl and F. Hunt, Stochastic Approaches in Bioinformatics, ITL Pre-competency Fund, $100K.

 

 

Part IV

Staff

 

Abbie O'Gallagher   Roldan Pozo assembles the
Jazznet PC cluster.

Left: Abbie OGallagher of MCSD-Boulder. Right: Roldan Pozo and a Jazznet PC cluster.

 

MCSD consists of full time permanent staff located at NIST laboratories in both Gaithersburg, MD and Boulder, CO. This is supplemented with a variety of faculty appointments, guest researchers, postdoctoral appointments, and student appointments. The following list reflects the status at the end of FY1999.

Legend: F = Faculty Appointee, GR = Guest Researcher, PD = Postdoctoral Appointee, S = Student, PT= Part time


Division Staff
Ronald Boisvert, Chief
Robin Bickel, Secretary
Peggy Liller, Clerk
Joyce Conlon
Karin Remington, PT

Mathematical Modeling Group
Geoffrey McFadden, Leader
Bradley Alpert (Boulder)
Timothy Burns
Alfred Carasso
Michael Donahue
Fern Hunt
Anthony Kearsley
Stephen Langer
Agnes O'Gallagher (Boulder)
Donald Porter
Daniel Anderson, GR
James Blue, GR
Richard Braun, F
Eleazer Bromberg, GR
John Gary, GR
Bruce Murray, GR
Dianne O'Leary, F
Antti Pesonen, GR
Melinda Sandler, S
David Sterling, PD

Mathematical Software Group
Roldan Pozo, Leader
Daniel Lozier
Marjorie McClain
Bruce Miller
William Mitchell
Bert Rust
Bonita Saunders
Brianna Blazer, S
Frank Olver, GR
Yuri Rappoport, GR
G.W. Stewart, F
Galen Wilkerson, S

Optimization and Computational Geometry Group
Ronald Boisvert, Acting Leader
Isabel Beichl
Javier Bernal
Christoph Witzgall
Theodore Einstein, GR
Saul Gass, F
Alan Goldman, GR
James Lawrence, F
Francis Sullivan, GR

Recent Former Staff
Janet Rogers (Boulder), Retired
Bruce Fabijonas, PD, Southern Methodist University
Eden Crane, S
Susan Han, S
Paul Johnson, S
Elaine Kim, S
Chun Lee, S
Scott Safranek, S
Philip Yam, S

 

Appendix: Abbreviations Used in this Report

ACM Association for Computing Machinery
AMSAmerican Mathematical Society
ATPNIST Advanced Technology Program
BLASBasic Linear Algebra Subprograms
BFRLNIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory
CSTLNIST Chemical Sciences and Technology Laboratory
DARPADefense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DLMFDigital Library of Mathematical Functions
EEELNIST Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory
GAMSGuide to Available Mathematical Software
ITLNIST Information Technology Laboratory
MAAMathematical Association of America
MCSDITL Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division
MELNIST Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory
MSELNIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory
NRCNational Research Council
NSFNational Science Foundation
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
OOMMFObject-Oriented Micromagnetic Modeling Framework
OOFObject-Oriented Finite Elements (for materials microstructure)
PECASEresidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
PLNIST Physics Laboratory
SIAMSociety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SIMAMEL Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications
SRDPTS Standard Reference Data Program
TINTriangulated Irregular Network
TNTTemplate Numerical Toolkit
TSNIST Technology Services
VRMLVirtual Reality Modeling Language