IFIP Working Group 2.5 Regional Workshop

The Changing Face of Mathematical Software

June 3-4, 2004

Washington, DC, USA

The field of mathematical software has undergone a major transformation in the past 15 years. Highly flexible commercial software systems have emerged that have enabled fairly complex mathematical computations to be done routinely. The user community is much more diverse than ever before, while the general understanding and appreciation of the difficulty of numerical computing has diminished. Researchers solving problems beyond the capabilities of the mass-market systems now demand sophisticated user interfaces, graphics, and related tools to create specialized research-oriented problem solving environments of their own. Such environments are constructed using a wide variety of computing languages. Math software interfaces must be increasingly flexible for reuse in such environments. At the high end of the computing spectrum, extremely complex multi-level computing architectures remain very challenging to exploit. For such systems, the availability of stable and robust operating systems and libraries continues to be a limiting issue.

This workshop we will consider current mathematical software development efforts and their use in applications to provide a picture of how mathematical software developers are coping with these sometimes-competing forces.

Location: Marvin Center, Room 307

George Washington University

800 21st St. NW

Washington, DC

Sponsors: International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.5 (Numerical Software); National Institute of Standards and Technology; George Washington University

Organizers: Ron Boisvert (boisvert@nist.gov) and Abdou Youssef (ayoussef@gwu.edu)

Program