About
From SCIEnce
Project summary
The SCIEnce project is an integrated programme that aims to address the fragmentation of Europe’s symbolic computation software infrastructure. This is vital infrastructure for research in a wide range of scientific disciplines, and European groups have developed many leading systems which are widely used in research, but are not composable, duplicate development effort and are failing to track relevant developments in underpinning Computer Science. We will address these issues by jointly undertaking a program of networking, software development and research, complemented by a programme of trans-national access to the world-leading Centre of Expertise at RISC-Linz.
Project objectives
The goal of this project is to improve integration between key world-leading developers and application experts in Symbolic Computation software systems. Such systems form a vital infrastructural tool in areas of modern academic and commercial research, with important applications in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering and other technical disciplines. The project will improve technical cooperation between the developer and application groups; ensure the incorporation of important developments in Computer Science, including modern memory management technology; allow the construction of tools exploiting software components developed in multiple systems; and make such tools usable on the important new infrastructure of heterogeneous computational Grids. The specific objectives of the project are to:
- eliminate the European fragmentation in the field of Symbolic Computation by bringing together the main actors and facilitate the access to their specific knowledge
- develop versions of the GAP, Maple, KANT and MuPAD systems which can inter-communicate via a common standard Web services interface. Where necessary, the project will build on work produced by the Framework IV OpenMath (ESPRIT 24969) and Framework V MONET (IST-2001-34145) projects, and will exploit international standards such as the Global Grid Forum’s (GGF’s) web services resource framework (WS-RF)
- develop common standards and middleware to allow the production of Grid-enabled systems for Symbolic Computation
- construct research prototypes supporting appropriate security, scheduling, resource broking for complex Symbolic Computing applications on computational Grids
- identify common patterns of Grid computation across a range of Symbolic Computing applications, and to tailor the Grid-enabled systems to those patterns
- promote and ensure uptake of recent developments in programming language technology, including automatic memory management, into Symbolic Computation systems
- increase technical cooperation between systems developers, including shared development of components.
