A minisymposium in honor of Jim Pool has been organized as
part of the ICIAM 2007 meeting.  A description is attached below.
Members of Working Group 2.5 are especially encouraged to be
there to help us wish Jim well on his recent retirement.

We will provide further details after the program for the meeting
is finalized.

Ron Boisvert and Brian Ford

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Recent Advances in Software Tools for Scientific Computing

Minisymposium at ICIAM 2007, Zurich, 16-20 July 2007
http://www.iciam07.ch/

Computation has become an indispensable tool for progress in science
and engineering. For applied mathematicians and computer scientists
who develop mathematical software tools, the central question remains
the same as it was in the early days of computing: how should
mathematical software be designed to get the highest performance
possible, while remaining cost-effective to develop and maintain, as
well as easy for users to deploy? The computing landscape today,
however, is far different than it was when general purpose electronic
computers emerged some 50 years ago. While processors have become
cheap and ubiquitous, their underlying computer architectures have
actually become more complex. Today such systems have multi-level
hierarchical memory systems, multiple processors per chip,
special-purpose co-processors, etc. On the Web, emerging service-
oriented architectures (computational grids) envision the ad-hoc
marshaling of disparate and widely distributed resources to attack
computational problems and to share results. At the high end, hundreds
to thousands of processors and memory systems are linked together into
complex interconnection networks to address society's most challenging
problems. Designers of mathematical software libraries, problem-solving
environments, and related tools, which provide users with the
capabilities needed to efficiently exploit such systems for practical
use, are being challenged anew to develop scientific computing tools
for this increasingly complex computing landscape. In this minisymposium,
we will review how researchers and developers of scientific computing
tools are addressing these issues. Speakers will review the state-of-
the-art in mathematical software design, including emerging numerical
algorithms, software architectures, user interfaces, testing
methodologies, as well as some selected applications. (This
minisymposium is dedicated to Dr. James C.T. Pool on the occasion of
his recent retirement.)

Session 1

1. Reflections on Progress in Software Tools for Numerical Software
  Brian Ford

2. Mathematical Software and MATLAB
  Cleve Moler

3. Recent Progress in LAPACK and ScaLAPACK Libraries for Numerical
  Linear Algebra
  Sven Hammarling

4. The Challenges of Multicore and Specialized Accelerators for
  Mathematical Software
  Jack Dongarra

Session 2

5. The Evolution of Software for Computational Optimization
  Jorge J More

6. A Test Harness TH For High Performance Numerical Software
  Brian T Smith

7. Special Functions, Reference Data and Mathematical Software
  Ronald F Boisvert

8. Evolution of Mathematical Software
  James C.T. Pool