"The application driven Ctadel environment"


Robert van Engelen and Lex Wolters
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Gerard Cats
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)
The Netherlands


Ctadel is an environment for the generation of efficient, computer-architecture
dependent codes for PDE-based models. It transforms a high-level PDE problem
specification into efficient codes for serial, vector, and parallel computer
architectures. This process includes computing-cost heuristics and
architecture-specific symbolic transformations. Furthermore, application
dependent knowledge is incorporated into the transformations on the highest
level down to those on the lowest level. Ctadel can be classified as an
application driven problem solving environment.

Ctadel has been successfully applied to a computationally intensive part of
the numerical weather forecast system HIRLAM, which is in operational use at
several European meteorological institutes. It could be concluded that Ctadel
is able to generate efficient codes for this part of HIRLAM on different
computer architectures. Most of the codes even outperformed the hand-written
production codes.

Prototyped as an environment for HIRLAM Ctadel has gradually matured into a
small-scale computer algebra system that has the potential of manipulating
and transforming a wider range of application models.