SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE DESIGN
THE OBJECT-ORIENTED WAY
This book is about software design. Although many current discus-
sions of scientific programming focus on scalable performance, this
book focuses on scalable design. The authors analyze how the struc-
ture of a package determines its developmental complexity according
to such measures as bug search times and documentation information
content. The work presents arguments for why these issues impact
solution cost and time more than does scalable performance. The final
chapter explores the question of scalable execution and shows how
scalable design leads to scalable execution. The book’s focus is on
program organization, which has received considerable attention in
the broader software engineering community, where graphical descrip-
tion standards for modeling software structure and behavior have been
developed by computer scientists. These discussions might be enriched
by engineers and scientists who write scientific codes. This book aims to
bring such scientific programmers into discussion with computer scien-
tists. The authors do so by introducing object-oriented software design
patterns in the context of scientific simulation.
Dr. Damian Rouson is the manager of the Reacting Flow Research
Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He was formerly Section
Head of Combustion Modeling and Scaling at the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory. He was assistant professor of mechanical engineering at
the City University of New York, visiting assistant professor at the
University of Maryland, and Special Scientist at the University of
Cyprus. Damian Rouson received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engi-
neering at Howard University and his Masters and PhD in Mechanical
Engineering from Stanford University.
Dr. Jim Xia is currently a software designer and tester at the IBM
Canada Lab in Markham, Ontario, Canada. He received his PhD in
Physics from the University of Western Ontario in 1997.
Dr. Xiaofeng Xu is currently an Analyst at General Motors Corp. in
Pontiac, Michigan. At this job, he performs airflow and combustion
CFD analysis to support base engine designs. He received his PhD in
Mechanical Engineering (2003) from Iowa State University in Ames
and is the author or co-author of 39 referred publications.
