Graduate school introductory computational simulation course pedagogy

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computation for Design and Optimization Program, 2009.Vita. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Numerical methods and algorithms have developed and matured vastly over the past three decades now that computational analysis can be performed on almost any personal computer. There is a need to be able to teach and present this material in a manner that is easy for the reader to understand and be able to go forward and use. Three popular course at MIT were without lecture notes; in this thesis the lecture notes are presented. The first chapter covers material taught in Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations (2.097/6.339/16.920) specifically the Integral Equation Methods section of this course, chapter two shows the notes for the course Introduction to Numerical Simulation (2.096/6.336/16.910), and chapter three contains the notes for the class Foundations of Algorithms and Computational Techniques in Systems Biology (6.581/20.482). These course notes give a broad overview of many algorithms and numerical methods that one can use to solve many problems that span many fields - from biology to aerospace to electronics to mechanics.by Laura L. Proctor.S.M

Acquiring data designs from existing data-intensive programs

The problem area addressed in this thesis is extraction of a data design from existing data intensive program code. The purpose of this is to help a software maintainer to understand a software system more easily because a view of a software system at a high abstraction level can be obtained. Acquiring a data design from existing data intensive program code is an important part of reverse engineering in software maintenance. A large proportion of software systems currently needing maintenance is data intensive. The research results in this thesis can be directly used in a reverse engineering tool. A method has been developed for acquiring data designs from existing data intensive programs, COBOL programs in particular. Program transformation is used as the main tool. Abstraction techniques and the method of crossing levels of abstraction are also studied for acquiring data designs. A prototype system has been implemented based on the method developed. This involved implementing a number of program transformations for data abstraction, and thus contributing to the production of a tool. Several case studies, including one case study using a real program with 7000 Hues of source code, are presented. The experiment results show that the Entity-Relationship Attribute Diagrams derived from the prototype can represent the data designs of the original data intensive programs. The original contribution of the thesis is that the approach presented in this thesis can identify and extract data relationships from the existing code by combining analysis of data with analysis of code. The approach is believed to be able to provide better capabilities than other work in the field. The method has indicated that acquiring a data design from existing data intensive program code by program transformation with human assistance is an effective method in software maintenance. Future work is suggested at the end of the thesis including extending the method to build an industrial strength tool

Transonic Symposium: Theory, Application, and Experiment, Volume 1, Part 1

Topics addressed include: wind tunnel and flight experiments; computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications, industry overviews; and inviscid methods and grid generations