Figure 1. Components of ANSE.
Background
In accordance with National Science Foundation's Digital Library initiative (NSDL), the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (CFD Lab), and the Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS), in collaboration with the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) at the University of Tennessee, are developing a distributed computational problem solving environment for research and education. The need for education in computational science is paramount with the advent of modern computers. Computational simulation has become a common engineering tool, supporting analytical and experimental methods, while computational pedagogy is, in general, a focus of higher education, and not a part of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. The effort of the CFD Lab, JICS, and the ICL group is to design a computational mechanics problem solving environment, available over the Internet. This system, simply called the Active Netlib Simulation Environment, ANSE, is an interactive learning environment interoperable with existing computational, and data management services.
Advancement in education is apparent with the decreasing cost of computers, while the Internet provides resources to all classes of people at all levels of education. In engineering and science the need for shared resources and intellectual achievement is greater than ever before to bring communities together for greater understanding and singularity of purpose. But as computing power increases, the amount of information that is published on the Internet is increasing exponentially. The ablility to sort through, analyse, and process information has become more difficult. Efficient identification and processing of new information aids an indivual's learning curve and promotes focus on advancing technology. However, constant changing computer technology combined with engineering can be overwhelming as problem complexity increases. The need has arisen to separate (make transparent) computer science from engineering so that topics important to the researcher can be explored. Also complicating this issue for both researcers and educators is the cost of hardware and software resources. Many tools are developing, or have been developed, to address these issues of information exchange, hardware and software resources, and data management, but few have been applied to practical research, or the classroom.
In short, ANSE is an environment for solving computational problems. It is an extensible, equation based, distributed, interoperable, open source package for research and education. ANSE provides the means to tap into available distributed resources in a user friendly manner, where various levels of complexity are made transparent to the user. As problem classes become more involved, the intricate details come to the surface providing complete user control. This openly available system provides a general framework for researchers to use available computational resources, their own computational resources, or a combination of both.
The ANSE front end is a grahical user interface for entering input data and to access existing computational resources, like NetSolve, data management tools, scientific data visualization, and archiving (Figure 1). This combination provides the capability for educators in engineering, science, and mathematics to design curricula for teaching computational techniques, parallel computing, and numerical analysis. In the research community, ANSE provides the means for different computational science disciplines, like computational physics, chemistry, and biology, to build libraries of tools and data. The end goal is a connection between libraries of all disciplines and educators for unification of the computational science community