Description:
An interesting initiative that I am working on is defining and building a highly extensible scientific computing platform based on the open source Eclipse framework.The present tools developed by scientists (numerical libraries, simulation tools, i/o manipulation software) do not merge well with each other due to incompatibilities in programming languages, differences in styles of programming, and the lack of architectural guidelines. Defining a unified framework will benefit the whole community.
Leveraging the already powerful and constantly evolving Eclipse technologies is definitely a strategic choise in defining such a scientific computing platform. Eclipse already has tools and libraries for modeling, graphical editing, plugin development, automated code generation and many other functionalities. Research is about selecting the capabilities already available in Eclipse, identifying additional software (numerical libraries, etc) and joing them with Eclipse and defining the guidelines for the extravaganza.
Such a universal scientific computing platform has many advantages. Scientists will then be able to utilize the extension points and build innovations on top of the platform with little effort. They can directly contribute to the evolving platform. Final product creation can be streamlined significantly reducing the effort in creating them from the scratch. And its universal nature will bring people from many disciplins together (Mathematics, Space, Electical, Civil, Mechanical, Nuclear, Medical, ...). The one platform openly available for all!