Collection of abstracts 14th GAMM-Seminar Kiel on Concepts of Numerical Software January 23rd to 25th, 1998.

Saturday, January 24th, 1998

On the Object-Oriented Redesign of a Real-World CFD Program

A part of the project Software Engineering Methods for Parallel Scientific Applications (SEMPA, funded by the BMBF) is about investigating in object-oriented methods for scientific computing. A commercial real-world Fortran 77 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application is being redesigned in C++ and Java. This redesign bases on newly developed numerical objects rather than the existing array data structures of the Fortran 77 code.

The CFD program has been divided in two parts for this redesign: the numerical solver part and the discretization part. The numerical solution method is a coupled algebraic multigrid method [3], which has been redesigned and fully implemented in C++ [1,2]. Currently, the object-oriented solver is ported to Java. The element-based finite-volume discretization is currently redesigned and developed in Java.

The presentation will introduce the object-oriented design of the whole CFD program and comment on the use of the object-oriented paradigm for real-world scientific computing applications. Especially, Java as programming language for scienitific computing is discussed.

References:

1. M. Weidmann. 'Object-Oriented Redesign of a Real-World Fortran 77 Solver', chapter in "Modern Software Tools in Scientific Computing", edited by E. Arge, A. M. Bruaset and H. P. Langtangen, Birkhaeuser Press, 1997.
2. M. Weidmann. 'Design and Performance Improvement of a Real-World Object-Oriented C++ Solver with STL', The 1997 International Scientific Computing in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments Conference, Springer LNCS, 1997.
3. Michael. J. Raw 'A Coupled Algebraic Multigrid Method for the 3D Navier-Stokes Equations', chapter in "Fast Solvers for Flow Problems", Proceedings of the 10th GAMM-Seminar, Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics Vol. 49, Vieweg-Verlag, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden, 1995.