Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021 - 14

Software & Simulation
programming languages community
has been in creating domain-specific
languages.
Automated Tools and DomainSpecific
Languages
Multi-physics modeling of a spacecraft heat shield.
the issue of correctness by providing very
specific built-in examples for the multiphysics
problem. The problem with this
approach, of course, is the lack of flexibility
in creating new models or generalizing
existing problems for new platforms.
If you are hoping to create a
model for something not previously implemented
by the tool developers, you
are often out of luck.
In practice, once reaching the limits
of tools available, scientists end up writing
their own software code. To reason
about how to implement their code efficiently,
correctly, or even at all, scientists
need to act like software engineers.
Creating custom code is a difficult task
that requires the practitioner to balance
the necessary customizations for their
problem, leverage existing code and libraries,
and implement custom tests to
evaluate the model. In place of the rare
superhero that is a physicist, high-performance
computing expert, debugging
savant, and software engineer, some
things can fall through the cracks.
Due to these factors, the level of effort
to encode, verify, execute, and maintain
multi-physics problems is quite high. Encoding
a model is typically a manual, adhoc,
and difficult task to get right. One
way to cut that down is to separate the
tasks of physics modeling from software
engineering. This would allow scientists
to focus on science and the tools they are
using to automatically generate highperformance,
correct code. One popular
method enabling this approach in the
Domain-specific tools are designed so
that domain experts can write their
problems in a syntax and style that is familiar
to them and so that their applications
are representative of the problems
they are trying to solve. In the scientific
modeling space, this can include keywords
to represent boundary conditions,
governing equations, and solving techniques
to represent a single model. The
multi-physics domain can involve capturing
both the individual models being
created and the communication between
them, making it explicit so that the
model developer can deliberately choose
how the information is passed between
models. Some tools support the mathematics
(involved in a physical phenomena)
by providing a library of available
scenarios or allowing them to define
their own set of equations. By allowing
the user to define their own equations,
domain-specific tools can give scientists
the flexibility needed to encode a wide
range of problems.
Cutting edge R&D underway at places
like DARPA is developing a tool for the
multi-physics space focusing on robustness.
These tools utilize domain-specific
DSL-Modeling Process
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Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021

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