AMRITA -- A computational facility

Abstract

Amrita is a software system for automating numerical investigations. The system is driven using its own powerful scripting language, Amrita, which facilitates both the composition and archiving of complete numerical investigations, as distinct from isolated computations. Once archived, an Amrita investigation can later be reproduced by any interested party, and not just the original investigator, for no cost other than the raw CPU time needed to parse the archived script. In fact, this entire lecture can be reconstructed in such a fashion. To do this, the script: constructs a number of shock-capturing schemes; runs a series of test problems, generates the plots shown; outputs the LATEX to typeset the notes; performs a myriad of behind-the-scenes tasks to glue everything together. Thus Amrita has all the characteristics of an operating system and should not be mistaken for a common-or-garden code