PSE Park: Framework for Problem Solving Environments

In this paper, we introduce a new framework called PSE Park for constructing a Problem Solving Environment (PSE); it enables us to construct PSEs easily. PSE Park outputs PSEs depending on user’s demand/input. In this sense, PSE Park is a kind of PSE for PSE, and helps users to construct PSEs. PSE Park consists of four engines: PIPE server, core, registration engine, and console. A PSE designed and constructed in PSE Park consists of several cores, which are functions of a PSE. The PIPE server manages the cores on the basis of the core map, which expresses the flow of the cores for a specific PSE. The output of each core is retrieved and merged by the PIPE server. All outputs of the cores are saved and easily reused. The cores are independent of programming languages because each core is executed individually as a process in PSE Park. They are registered by using the registration engine, and users access the engines via the console. All data including the core itself, definitions related to the core, the core map, results, and so on are stored in a distributed key-value store on the cloud computing environment. PSE Park retrieves the data by using a key name that can identify individual data uniquely. We applied PSE Park to develop the job execution PSE and the PSE for partial differential equation (PDE)-based problems. The job execution PSE helps Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulation execution. This PSE outputs the simulation results of the electric field. PDE-based PSE supports some simulation steps. Seven cores were used to construct this example PSE. By using this PSE, users can execute a PDE-based simulation and obtain a detailed document about the simulation. We believe that the concept of PSE Park, i.e., a framework for PSE development, presents a meaningful new direction for problem solving environments.