4.7 Computational Environment

Program development has a major role in many projects. In this respect, many projects have shared interests and needs. This has led to the development of program libraries common to the whole laboratory.

FEMPAK (Raino A.E. Mäkinen and Jari Toivanen)

FEMPAK 1.0 is a portable software package for the numerical solution of two-dimensional partial differential equations. It is based on the finite element method. The package consists of a set of low-level subroutines for the assembly and solution of the discrete finite element equations, a set of example driver programs and software to visualize the results. The graphical devices supported are X-windows and PostScript.

NDA (Erkki Häkkinen and Pasi Koikkalainen)

The Neural Data Analysis (NDA) is an environment for data modeling, data reduction, and visualization. It has special support for neural network algorithms, like the tree structured self-organizing map. Most of the functionality is in the kernel, which is portable end easy to interface with other software. Example interfaces are provided via postscript, Xview, Visual Basic, and Java. NDA based products, made by private enterprices, include customer profiling, fault diagnostics and process modeling.

NDA software has been developed under TEKES technology programme on ``Adaptive and Intelligent Systems Applications''.

NSOLIB (Marko M. Mäkelä)

NSOLIB is a Fortran subroutine library for nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems with single or multiple objective functions. The methods are able to handle either simple bounds for variables, linear, nonlinear or nonsmooth constraints, or all of them at the same time. NSOLIB subroutines are implementations of the proximal bundle method. They have been tested with various standard test examples and in several research projects of the laboratory in different computing environments (microcomputers, workstations, mainframe and supercomputers). There is a need for NSOLIB since commercial subroutine packages do not contain efficient codes for nonsmooth optimization.

SIM2++ (Risto Lahdelma)

SIM2++ is an efficient object-oriented simulation library for Pascal and C++ languages. SIM2++ supports the process-oriented simulation paradigm by providing virtually concurrent processes using a low-level coroutine mechanism. The processes are run in simulated real time and they can exchange information using messages (methods) or shared memory. The system is particularly useful for modelling discrete event systems with active and passive components, such as transaction generators, server processes and queues.

SIM2++ has been developed in cooperation with Helsinki University of Technology (HUT). SIM2++ is in educational use at the University of Jyväskylä and Helsinki University of Technology, and it has been used for modelling the production of Rautaruukki Steel Factory in Raahe and Pilkington Glass Works in Lahti.

Computer Facilities

The Laboratory of Scientific Computing and the Department of Mathematics had 30 HP-9000 series workstations and X-terminals, 3 Sun Ultra Workstations, 40 Pentium-level and 20 486-level PCs and one Silicon Graphics Indigo2 for researchers and students in 1996. In addition, the facilities at the Finnish National Supercomputer Centre (Cray T3E, Cray C90 and IBM SP2) and the Computer Centre of the University of Jyväskylä (VAX 4000-300 and four SUN 4/670 computers connected to terminals and PCs with a local area network) are available.



Janne Mäkinen