Getting Started with ITAPS Software

ITAPS software is a continually growing suite of interoperable software products divided, conceptually, into three distinct categories; integrated-Services, component-Services and interfaces. Interfaces for mesh, geometry, fields and the relationships among them are the fundamental infrastructure necessary to create interoperable scientific computing software products. These interfaces are one of the key enabling technologies the ITAPS Center is responsible for developing and maintaining.

In addition, the ITAPS Center is using the interfaces to componentize existing and new mesh and geometry tools to create component-services as well as integrating these products to create high-level integrated-services. We note that many of the tools in the ITAPS software suite exist in two forms; an ITAPS-compliant version and its Conventional counterpart which may or may not include the necessary wrappers to work with ITAPS interfaces. We provide links only to the ITAPS-compliant versions of the software on these web pages; in most cases, the conventional versions are available for download from their home institutions or you may contact the ITAPS POC for more information.

Lastly, and most importantly, for a targeted set of applications, the ITAPS Center provides direct, hands-on, customer support to end-user application developers who want to integrate ITAPS software products with their applications [contact Lori Diachin about this support]. The ITAPS software suite is the result of a collaboration of the interface design and integration expertise of the ITAPS Center with component developers in the broader scientific computing community.

When getting ready to use ITAPS software for the first time, the first thing to consider what tools you are interested in using and how you are hoping to work with them. Typically, application software developers are interested in ITAPS software because they would like to incorporate functionality provided by integrated or component level services into their own application codes. More information on usage strategies for application scientists can be found here. In contrast, developers of pre- or post-processing tools who want to make their tools available to a wide community of users are interested in ITAPS Interfaces. The list below briefly describes each of the three categories of ITAPS software and provides links to pages that describe software in that category in more detail as well as where current releases may be obtained.


Category
 Brief Description
Integrated
Services
 		State-of-the-art, enabling simulation technologies for petascale computing representing the integration of a variety of components. Examples of such services include petascale mesh generation, shape optimization tools, AMR-front tracking tools, and mesh-to-mesh solution transfer.
Component
Services
 Focused software tools providing advanced capability for solving specific scientific computing problems. Examples of component services include dynamic partitioning, mesh quality improvement, adaptive loops, and mesh interpolation kernel management tools.
Interfaces
 		The fundamental interoperability infrastructure necessary to create interoperable and interchangeable components and services. Applications typically implement a subset of these on top of their own data structures to get access to ITAPS services.