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1987
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1988
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1989
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1996
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Engineering Computing Newsletter: Issue 6

January-March, 1988

Editorial

I apologise for the late arrival of the Newsletter. This is due to severe staff shortages in our Reprographics Section at RAL. We all hope that this will be resolved in the near future.

In December 1987, an Active Memory Technology Ltd. Distributed Array Processor (DAP) was delivered and installed at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. A brief overview of the work the DAP will be doing has been included.

A report of the Special Grant Holders' Meeting, held on 15 December 1987, is given. The outcome of the Computing Facilities Committee meeting on 21 December 1987 is reported. Decisions made at this meeting will have an impact on existing and potential new grant holders and there is a short article on the revised arrangements for grant holders currently using multi-user mini computer facilities. The next Engineering Computing User Group Meeting has been rearranged to Thursday, 26 May 1988,to fit in with the schedule agreed for the EASE policy to be presented to the Engineering Board (July 1988).

One further Workshop is to be held, in April at Leeds, following the third one held at Warwick on 1-3 February.

Fran Childs (Editor)

Report on the Computing Facilities Committee Meeting 21 December 1987

This was the first meeting with Professor John Douce in the chair.

The main points of interest to arise and decisions made were as follows:

  1. All the recommendations of the Computing Facilities Technical Advisory Group (CFTAG), suitably modified as a result of the Special Grant Holders' Meeting on 15 December 1987, were approved. (Details of these are given in the report of the Grant Holders' Meeting in this Newsletter.)
  2. The latest draft of the EASE document. including the Schedules, was approved for circulation to Subject Committees (for their comments and inputs to the appropriate Schedules) and the SERC Director, Computing, and the Computer Board (for information). The final version of the document and the resource implications (money and manpower) will be presented to the Engineering Board in July for approval.
  3. The revised programme for the Transputer Initiative, reflecting the action requested by the Engineering Board at its meeting in October 1987, was approved for submission to the Board meeting to be held on 19 January. Details of the revised programme will be published when the outcome of this Board meeting is known.
  4. Two new Extra-Mural Research Contracts were approved:
    1. Dr J Bovey and Professor P J Brown (Kent University): Membership of the MIT X-Consortium - to ensure the EASE programme keeps in touch with developments of the X-windows system.
    2. Dr D B Arnold (University of East Anglia): Progression and Direction of the Proposed Computer Graphics Interface (CGI) Standard - to provide the ISO project with a CGI document editor for 1 year and to ensure that X-windows and CGI are compatible.

The next meeting of the Computing Facilities Committee is on 8 June 1988.

Mike Jane (Head, ECFE)

AI Support for Engineers

1. Questionnaire

In the last issue of Engineering Computing Newsletter we reported the preliminary analysis of the AI Support Questionnaire. Since then we have received another 24 replies, bringing the total to 68. Our overall impression of the result remains very much the same. We will try our best to respond to the requests. Again, we would like to thank all who took the time to answer the questionnaire.

2. Workshops

2.1 AI in Civil Engineering

Our first AI in Engineering Workshop took place on 6 November. This workshop was organised specifically for civil engineers. Altogether we had 27 participants from 14 different universities. The programme consisted of five talks, four demonstrations and two discussion sessions. Happily, everything went smoothly on the day.

The speakers and the titles of the talks were:

The four systems demonstrated were:

There is a report of the workshop which consists of a collection of five papers by the speakers and a summary of the discussion sessions. A small number of copies are still available.

2.2 AI in Engineering - Tools and Applications

The next workshop is scheduled for 18 March 1988. As the section title indicates, the theme for this workshop is Tools and Applications. This is intended to be of interest and relevance to all engineers. There will be a number of talks covering a variety of tools for building expert systems - from PC shells to more exotic toolkits. Experience with using these tools for developing application programs will also be discussed.

Again, we would like to limit the number of delegates to around thirty, which seems to be a good size for this kind of workshop. If you are interested in attending please let us know as soon as possible.

3. Courses

The following gives the details of the courses that will be given at AW in the first quarter of 1988:

Paul Chung (AI Applications Institute. Edinburgh University)

Special Grant Holders Meeting, December 1987

This meeting was called by the Engineering Computing Facilities Executive (ECFE) in response to the action from the Computing Facilities Technical Advisory Group (CFTAG) to discuss the implications of its recommendations to the Computing Facilities Committee (CFC) on the proposed programme for 1988/89 and beyond.

The response to the invitation was excellent, with 40 grant holders or their representatives, present After a brief presentation on the financial scene for Estimates Year and the Five Year Forward Look, Professor Munro (Chairman of the Engineering Computing User Group) gave a summary of the CFTAG recommendations and the reasons behind them.

After some detailed discussion, the meeting decided to request some modification to two particular recommendations as follows:

  1. one Prime (the RAL 9955) should continue to provide a service until 31 March 1990, to ensure that existing commitments are satisfied and avoid the need for people to change their computing environment in the middle of their research project, and,
  2. the closure of the Primes at City University, Surrey University and University College London should be delayed to 31 March 1988 to allow alternative arrangements to be made for the large local user base.

The Chairman of CFTAG, Prof M P Atkinson, agreed to modify the recommendations to CFC in line with these requests.

The remaining recommendations made by CFTAG to CFC affecting grant holders were as follows:

  1. Manpower at RAL should be maintained at its present level. Any effort released in stopping or reducing components of the current programme should be redirected to EASE to help ensure its rapid introduction.
  2. Effect the rundown of the current programme in the following priority order:
    1. reduce support for Perqs to a minimum level by 31 March 1988 and stop maintenance on all but two of the Perqs at RAL immediately;
    2. stop support for the two remaining GEC multiuser minis at Cardiff and RAL on 31 May 1988;
    3. complete the rundown of the terminal pool by 31 March 1988;
    4. freeze the PRIMOS operating system immediately at Rev. 20.2.4;
    5. close the two development Prime systems at RAL (on 31 December 1987) and UMIST (on 31 January 1988);
    6. stop support for the Prime systems at UMIST and Warwick by 31 May 1988;
    7. redeploy released Prime support effort at RAL and UMIST to EASE related activities, in particular to provide assistance to existing multi-user mini users to transfer to the EASE environment.
  3. The provision of Central Servers and X25 communications for existing Sun Single User Systems must be given the highest priority and any savings in the current year should be used to address these areas.
Geoff Lambert (ECFE)

Multi-user Mini Computer Facilities Arrangements for Grant Holders

Following the acceptance by the Computing Facilities Committee of the recommendations of its Computing Facilities Technical Advisory Group, ECF support for the Prime and GEC systems is being drastically reduced. (See Report on Grant Holders' Meeting.)

Negotiations are underway with the responsible authorities at City, Surrey, UCL, UMIST, Warwick and Cardiff whereby they may take over ownership of the machine and assume responsibility for the continued support of the systems and resources may be available to existing local grant holders. Where this is not the case, existing grant holders are being contacted and suitable alternative facilities are being made available, i.e. on the Prime 9955 located at RAL. Where institutions continue to run the systems and offer facilities to existing grant holders, CFC has agreed to fund the continuing provision and support of such application software needed by grant holders for the duration of their grants.

Engineering Board Subject Committees have been informed of the new situation and any successful grant application which has not been announced will be offered alternative resources where the preferred original option is no longer available.

Potential future grant applicants are advised to discuss their computing requirements with any member of the ECFE at RAL prior to completing the RG2 application form.

Geoff Lambert (ECFE)

Use of the DAP at RAL

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory took delivery of a DAP computer from Active Memory Technology Ltd. on Friday, 11 December 1987. The DAP is a SIMD computer with a large number of processing units each connected to its neighbours in a rectangular grid of 32 by 32 (i.e. 1024) processors.

The first DAP was installed at Queen Mary College, London, in 1980. It was hosted by an ICL mainframe computer and provided a batch processing service to the UK academic community. The RAL DAP is hosted by a Sun3 computer and provides a powerful number crunching computer system for interactive use.

There are two main areas in which the RAL DAP will be used:

  1. Image processing: work will concentrate on the development of robust algorithms for detection of edges. This is an extension of techniques currently being investigated in two projects funded by the Alvey Programme.
  2. Highly interactive modelling of engineering systems: RAL will use its experience in simulation of semi-conductor fabrication processes and electrical behaviour of semi-conductor devices, and also in electromagnetic systems, to investigate the use of the DAP as a tool for engineering design. Some of the numerical techniques employed in these programs have been developed by RAL staff on the main-frame DAP at Queen Mary College.
Alan Bryden (ECFE)

Database Workshop, 3-5 December 1987

The Workshop, organised by the Engineering Computing Facilities Executive (ECFE) on behalf of the Computing Facilities Technical Advisory Group (CFTAG), was attended by a total of 45 delegates, divided between industry, software suppliers, universities and SERC establishments.

The main report, being produced by the Workshop Chairman, Professor M Shave of Liverpool University, will be available shortly and will be distributed to all who attended, and on request from the ECFE.

Initially, the points to note from the report are as follows:

  1. No currently available Database Management System caters for the known requirements of the engineering community. Some SQL-based products satisfy some requirements, some non-SQL products satisfy others, but not enough is known at this stage.
  2. Do not attempt to develop any home brew DBMS, but work with vendors to improve functionality.
  3. Urgent need to review current products, and initiate pilot studies of tools currently available.
  4. Organise workshops to study the relevant benefits of non-SQL products and to determine whether the facilities can be added to SQL products by CFC funded development.
  5. Provide consultancy service to engineering community.
  6. Initiate programme of education of users on what is available and how it can be used to their advantage. Additionally, encourage the community to state what their requirements are, both in the short and longer terms.
  7. Adopt standards on datafile, i.e. SQL.

Consideration is already being given on how these recommendations can be implemented.

Geoff Lambert (ECFE)

Future Workshops

Two further Workshops are scheduled. The next, on Numerical and Mathematical Software, will be held at Arden House, University of Warwick, on 1-3 February 1988. Topics include user requirements in several areas of engineering, including computational fluid dynamics, semi-conductor device modelling, high-frequency electromagnetics, analysis of transport networks, etc. There will be sessions on the impact of new architectures, use of new programming languages and the relationship between algebraic and numerical software.

The final Workshop on Integration of Engineering Software and Systems will be held at Bodington Hall, Leeds University on 20-22 April 1988. The provisional programme contains the following sessions:

  1. Existing problems in software integration, with presentations on data exchange, VLSI design, etc;
  2. Existing solutions focusing on the use of environments, especially in control engineering and astronomy;
  3. Medium term issues, with talks on software economics, advanced documentation systems and experience of IPSEs;
  4. Over the Horizon, considering AI based support systems and the proposal for a European Software Factory.

There will also be working group sessions in which the participants will be expected to draw up recommendations for software tools and components to be supported by CFC. Attendance at the Workshops is by invitation only and a limited number of places is available.

Alan Bryden (ECFE)

Esprit 962 - EVEREST

The European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology (ESPRIT) was launched by the European Community in February 1984. The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, acting as prime contractor, has been involved with this type of research activity since its beginning, having been involved in a project, commencing in April 1983, which spawned the Esprit 962 EVEREST Project.

EVEREST (European VEnture for REsearch in Stmiconductor Technology) will complete its second year in April 1988, but a major mile stone has already been passed with the project getting the go-ahead for its final two years, having successfully satisfied the European Commission appointed Esprit Review Panel that the mid-term objectives have been met.

EVEREST, in the tradition of Esprit, is a collaborative research project between several partners, including some from industry. The partners include the microfabrication plants at Philips of Eindhoven and SGS ATES of Milan, Analog Devices, NMRC in Ireland and IMEC in Belgium. The academic partners include Trinity College, Dublin, University College Swansea and the University of Bologne, with RAL acting as prime contractor.

The main aim of the project is to develop robust and efficient algorithms to simulate the steady-state and time-dependent behaviour of three-dimensional semi-conductor devices. These algorithms will be incorporated into a research computer program which is being developed as part of the project. The accuracy of the numerical techniques and the physical models used in the software are to be confirmed by comparing the solutions with predicted results for selected test problems and with the measurements on real devices.

To test the algorithms and code developed within the project, some simple 3D benchmarks have been produced. These consist of three diodes for testing the off-state solver: a simple block of silicon, a diode containing three-dimensional effects and a corner diode with oxide overlay.

The project now has, in the research code, a complete system for analysing many device structures, going from geometric modelling through to the display of the results. Clearly, there is much work still to be done in completing an on-state solution, but this initial start provides an excellent foundation for the future.

Geoff Lambert (ECFE)

Special Interest Group in Electromagnetics

At a meeting of the Special Interest Group in Electromagnetics (SIGEM) on 1 December, the future programme of electromagnetics support at RAL was discussed.

For nearly 3 years, an SERC funded grant involving Imperial College, Bath University and RAL has been carrying out research in the area of 3 dimensional eddy current analysis, leading to the creation of a series of computer programs employing the many new techniques developed.

This grant, which ends on 31 March 1988 has led to the development of a 3-D post-viewer, and two computer codes; one written at RAL (comprising a test bed for new algorithms and techniques), and the other written at Bath (including input from other related projects).

It was recommended at the SIGEM meeting that a total of 2 man years (spread over 2 years) should be funded to assess the existing eddy current packages, and to decide which will be the most appropriate for distribution to the UK academic community. The Electrical and Power Industries sub-committee have been approached, in the hope that they will fund the necessary manpower.

The chosen package would be mounted on a series of computers (in particular Prime, SUN, and probably the CRAY). It is also hoped that it would be enhanced based on the work of other research groups.

An update on the availability of existing electromagnetic software to academic users was given at the SIGEM meeting. At present, all networked Primes have copies of the electromagnetics packages, and this facility will continue on those Primes supporting SERC grants. Copies may also be distributed to SERC grant holders on non-networked machines. Other academic users can also obtain the software at the discounted SERC rates.

New versions of PE2D and TOSCA (including SCARPIA and the new post processor OPERA) are now available on Prime and Vax computers. Versions of PE2D and SCARPIA are also available on the Sun workstations.

It is intended to hold another Open Meeting at RAL in the Autumn of 1988, to inform users of the current state of electromagnetics software available from SERC. Further information will be sent nearer the time.

Cris Emson (Secretary, SIGEM)

Fringe Analysis Special Interest Group Meeting Held at the C.E.G.B. Headquarters, London 18 November 1987

The Fringe Analysis Special Interest Group was founded in 1985, by Dr K Paler (then at RAL), Dr B Tozer (CEGB), Dr D Robinson (NPL), Dr G Reid (NEL) and Dr J Tyrer (Loughborough University). It is an informal group of people with a common interest in automatic fringe analysis. About half the attendees at the inaugural meeting were working on development of techniques, the rest were end users.

A 2 day symposium was held at Loughborough University of Technology in November 1986. 19 papers were presented on various aspects of fringe analysis, these were published by the Open Technology Group as Automatic Fringe Analysis ISBN 0 948937 10 6. While the majority of the delegates had backgrounds in Physics, Mechanical Engineering or Computer Science, other disciplines present included Biochemistry, Civil, Electrical, and Offshore engineering, Mathematics and Medicine.

Encouraged by the success of this meeting, the organising committee planned a one day meeting Video Presentations of Fringe Analysis Techniques and Applications, with no other visual aids permitted. Each speaker presented a short video, some showing the application area and others advances in techniques. Topics covered included, particle image velocimetry applications in fluid and solid body mechanics, electronic speckle pattern interferograms for mass transfer measurements, a device for measuring surface contours, structured lighting techniques for 3-D sensing, applications of holographic interferometry to strain analysis, compressible flow interferograms, evaluation of the quality of optical components, and interferometric fringe processing applied to the visualisation of combustion flames.

In 1986 we had not realised the difficulty of producing videos, but despite our initial misgivings, the meeting was highly successful. Since all the speakers had their presentations on video, none overran their allotted time; presenters had been forced to think clearly about what they were trying to say well in advance of the meeting and time dependent problems were vividly illustrated, without the anxiety which normally attends live interactive demonstrations.

A composite video is planned, combining all the presentations into a useful summary of automatic fringe analysis as practised in 1987.

A further meeting is planned for Easter 1988.

Kate Crenell, Informatics Dept (FASIG committee member)

Forthcoming Events

Workshop on Integration of Engineering Software and Systems, 20 - 22 April 1988 Bodington Hall, Leeds University

AI in Engineering: Tools and Applications (a one day Workshop) 18 March 1988 AI Applications Institute, Edinburgh University

Engineering Computing User Group Thursday, 26 May 1988 Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Alvey Vision Club Conference 31 August - 2 September 1988 Manchester University

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