Second-Generation BEM Software Architecture

Tasks:

• DONE! Define a data file format (or CORBA interface?) for BEM models which will include:
• Title, author, description
• Mesh geometry
• Problem type
• Number and descriptions of degrees of freedom at each node
• LU-decomposed or inverted matrix (if available) in little-endian byte order
• Model parameters including bounding values (so they can be controlled by sliders in a GUI)
• Scripting, in scheme (guile)? lex?
• In progress, documentation is here.  Write a library of functions called libBEM for importing, manipulating and saving these data.  This library will be used by our own software, but should also be written as a library so it may be incorporated into the proprietary software of our industrial partners, such as Caterpillar's internal software, or IDEAS.  Library features:
• Surface specification routines, specifying node coordinates and element node numbers and surface numbers.  A routine to import Surface Evolver files.
• "Modular" elemental matrix calculation, easily extensible to allow addition of new problem types.
• Use of elemental matrices to calculate H and G matrices for sets of surfaces.
• Boundary condition specification routines, including Dirichlet, vonNeumann, and nonlinear Robin boundary conditions.
• One step solution of problems with Dirichlet, Neumann or linear Robin BCs by column switches; fast Newton-Raphson iterative solution of problems with nonlinear Robin BCs.
• Composite solution on two sets of surfaces by separate LU-decomposition of "S1" and "S2" surface matrices.
• Simple wrapper for matrix multiply, solve, invert and back-substitute routines for easy substitution of alternative approaches to these tasks (defaults to native BLAS/LAPACK routines).
• GNU autoconf/automake file system for simple installation on any Unix platform.
• Write a CORBA server interface called CBEM, and a simple text-based CLI CORBA client BEM.
• Write a GUI CORBA client gBEM.