Problem-solving Environments For Computational Science

This issue's theme is the rapidly evolving enabling technology of problem-solving environments, defined as "a computer system that provides all the computational facilities necessary to solve a target class of problems" for scientific computing. The 1991 and 1995 workshops on PSEs for physical simulation helped to define this research area and highlight the pertinent research issues. The first workshop made several recommendations that led to the 1995 NSF initiative on PSEs. These efforts have identified several PSE design goals together with approaches for realizing them