The value of graphical user interfaces has been recognized by the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) community, and most commercial CFD programs are supplied with a GUI. The complexity of CFD programs, however, makes GUI development impractical in academic and research and development environments. The value of GUIs in such environments motivates the development of a simple programmer's user interface toolkit, with which researchers and beginning CFD students can add GUIs to example or research codes in order to interactively control the execution of these codes, and observe solutions as they are calculated, even if the CFD codes are running on remote machines.Amtec proposes to develop a FORTRAN-callable user interface toolkit, initially consisting of only five subroutines, which, in combination with Tecplot and existing Unix libraries, will enable network-based interactive control of a CFD program, "on-the-fly" changing of program parameters (such as time step), and the full feature set of Tecplot to examine solutions as they are calculated.Potential Abstract:The proposed toolkit will substantially aid both instructors and researchers by allowing much greater interaction with and control over their CFD codes. It will be marketable to academic markets, as well as to government and private research labs as an addition to Tecplot, Amtec's graphical post-processing program.
