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Interests |
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Roscoe's current technical interests include applying modern Lean/Agile software engineering approaches to computational science and engineering problems including build and test systems (e.g. TriBITS), software development and integration workflows and processes, and software sustainability. His more recent interests focus on software engineering processes and workflows for creating packages of sustainable software and sustainable ecosystems of packages shared among large distributed teams of developers over long periods of time.
An ANA is any numerical algorithm that can be expressed abstractly solely in terms of vectors, vector spaces, linear operators, and other abstractions built on top of these without general direct data access or any general assumptions about data locality. Roscoe's interest in ANAs is that they can be implemented in a very general way and can be reused in an amazingly diverse set of applications. Roscoe is the the lead developer of the Thyra package which defines C++ interfaces and support software for the interoperability and development of ANAs.
Roscoe has a general interest in object-oriented methods for large-scale numerical programming. A number of Trilinos packages (e.g. Belos, Anasazi, NOX, LOCA ) are ANAs that are implemented in, or accessible through, Thyra interfaces. The Thyra interface layer has been used to effectively link together a wide variety numerical algorithmic software ranging from basic parallel linear algebra (e.g. Tpetra) all the way through transient sensitivities (e.g. Tempus) and optimization (e.g. ROL and MOOCHO).
Currently, C++ is the language of choice for large-scale, object-oriented numerical programming. C++ is unique in that it directly supports object-oriented programming, is close to the hardware (allowing for very high performance code right out of the box), is standardized, and has a high availability (including high performance platforms). However, C++ is perhaps the most complex programming language ever devised in wide-spread use. Roscoe has a general interest in developing and refining idioms to make object-oriented numerical programming in C++ safer, more productive, more general, and more efficient (e.g. Teuchos Memory Management Classes).