Scientific Computing Seminar

The first step entails learning a bit of the clients terminology, and finding out what can be computed by the client group that might feed an optimization package. The burden is largely on the optimization group for this process, but in the present case, the tsunami experts were used to working with their own client groups, like the state and local governments where tsunamis threaten, and so they were remarkably helpful in the process.

A major milestone is the formulation of a test problem. Another is to successfully run optimization on the test problem and then interpret the results and reformulate the test problem. However, a great deal of progress must be made before this is possible. First it is necessary to formulate a reasonable test problem to see how difficult the optimization problem will be. The tsunami problem is of fairly low dimension, but nasty. It is at least nondifferentiable, if not discontinuous. Our optimization group is experienced in working on real-world applications, and so we are used to such problems, which motivated the development of our NOMAD package.