School of Computer Science College of Engineering and Computer Science COMP 8790 - Software Engineering Project User Interface For A High Level Computing Language Final Report

With the growing number of cores in CPUs and the availability of GPUs for computing, high-performance computing has become the mainstream, yet the cost of writing highperformance programs is still high. A potential solution is to separate the descriptions of computation from the implementation. Such a solution allows domain experts to only focus on expressing what needs to be computed rather than how to compute it. The tasks will be handled by libraries which are written by programmers later. Such approaches help to reduce the overhead for scientists to learn how to implement highperformance programs. Mathematical notation is a tool that has been developed over hundreds of years. It is quite helpful in describing computational tasks in a compact and effective manner. So, mathematical notation may be considered as an interface between domain experts and programmers. Domain experts are able to write programs by a high level description language which is similar to mathematical notation. Programmers are able to extend the availability of such high level language by extending the libraries. Isaac is a system developed to meet such objectives. It provides facility for solving calculation intensive problems. The front-end of Isaac provides a development environment where users can specify computational tasks by mathematical expressions. And the back-end of Isaac is an execution engine where the tasks can be executed. In this context, a graphic user interface is required where a user can construct mathematical equations to describe the required computation in a WYSIWYG environment. This project involved designing, implementing, and testing such a user interface for Isaac. At the ends of the project, a relevant user interface that provides all of the necessary functionality for constructing, editing, saving, and loading mathematical equations was delivered.