Other research efforts are also underway in electronic design automation, robot motion and path planning, and high performance computing for scientific and engineering applications. During 1992, the Computer Science and Engineering Department undertook a major expansion of its research equipment facilities, especially in support of its VLSI activities.
Current work includes the development of high- performance software.
Parallel Processing and Scientific Computing Scientific computing is one of the driving forces for the development of new high-performance parallel computers. However, effectively using parallel hardware involves more than just parallelizing known sequential algorithms, since a parallel version of the best sequential algorithm for solving a given problem is often not the best parallel algorithm for solving that problem. Current work focuses on the development of efficient parallel numerical algorithms and seeks to answer fundamental questions related to implicit numerical integration methods and, more generally, about trade-offs between concurrency and convergence of iterative methods. Ongoing research within the Department is extending our knowledge and experience within these two innovations, and is also applying them to problems in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics. One main interest is in the study of implementational aspects of parallel algorithms on coarse-grain computers.