Speaker
Description
Modern scientific computing experiments often require the combination of multiple numerical packages, which are implemented in different programming languages. Thus, computational scientists face the task of combining these solvers together by removing the inter-language barrier via bindings or inter-process communication. Also, in cases where packages solving the same numerical problem (such as integration or optimization) need to be compared, the scientists receive additional workload by adapting function calls to a particular package. Such activities are non-trivial and error-prone in terms of the required programming and testing efforts. Moreover, this leads to duplicated work between different research groups, as usually such codes are used only internally and never published.
To address these issues, we work on the development of Open interfaces for Scientific Computing. This project has two main aspects: first, it simplifies crossing the inter-language barrier by automating data types conversion and function calls between different languages, and second, it provides generic interfaces for typical numerical problems. Therefore, users of Open Interfaces can switch more easily from one numerical implementation to another (which can be written in different languages and have different function signatures).
Our overall goal with this project is to improve interoperability and reproducibility in Scientific Computing by providing to the community a set of generic interfaces for common numerical problems, with numerical implementations adapted to these interfaces or even written against them, due to potential widespread use in the community.
This work is part of the Germany-wide project Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI) of the National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, NFDI).
