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Modern Software Tools for Scientific Computing |
Finite Element Kernel with Metaobject Protocol
Rostislav Chudoba
Institute for Statics and Dynamics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. rch@mail.sd.bi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Abstract
This chapter presents an alternative approach to the design of numerical software exemplified by a finite element system. The design is introduced in the context of current approaches (procedural and object-oriented) to the numerical software development. Its salient features are (1) the ability to express commonalities between algorithmic structures and (2) the explicit treatment of the dependency between metadata and data involved in the computation. By capturing this dependency within a general metaobject protocol, the effort to instantiate general algorithms in a variety of settings is minimized. Furthermore, the implementation of an abstract algorithm is more straightforward than in the usually applied object-oriented design. Better correspondence between the mathematical formulation and the computer code is demonstrated by two interesting issues: the amount of dynamic processing during the computation is reduced and a user interface for the produced application is constructed automatically.
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