Seminar Announcement

An Interactive Environment for Combining Simulation and Optimization Software

Arno Rasch
Research Assistant and Ph.D. student at the Institute for Scientific Computing, Aachen University.
Currently a short-term visitor at Argonne National Laboratory (11/2002-03/2003).
rasch@mcs.anl.gov

Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Building 921, Room 137
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.

The ongoing transition from simulation to optimization usually requires a concerted interplay between sophisticated simulation packages and optimization codes. Typical examples include multidisciplinary design optimization and parameter identification. Gluing together different codes by hand can be an onerous and error-prone task. Therefore, we propose an interactive environment for facilitating the combination of simulation and optimization software by enabling much of the interfacing work to be done automatically. Within this environment the user can experiment with different problem configurations and optimization codes in a seamless, interactive manner, e.g., to validate the robustness of a solution. Our framework includes support for automatic differentiation providing the derivatives required by many optimization algorithms. We describe the process of integrating the widely used computational fluid dynamics package FLUENT and a MINPACK-1 least squares optimizer into our environment and follow a sample session solving a data assimilation problem.

Hosted by Tammy Kolda (tgkolda@sandia.gov).

This seminar is hosted by the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Research Department at Sandia National Labs in Livermore, CA. For more information on this or other events, visit http://csmr.ca.sandia.gov/news.html. Visitors from outside Sandia require advance arrangements in order to attend. For more information, please contact the CSMR office management assistant Doretha Smith at dahall@sandia.gov or (925) 294-4630.