Visualization in Science Regular article The NUMLAB numerical laboratory for computation and visualisation

Abstract. A large range of software environments addresses numerical simulation, interactive visualisation and computa-tional steering. Most such environments are designed to cover a limited application domain, such as finite element or finite difference packages, symbolic or linear algebra computations or image processing. Their software structure rarely provides a simple and extensible mathematical model for the under-lying mathematics. Thus, assembling numerical simulations from computational and visualisation blocks, as well as build-ing such blocks is a difficult task for the researcher in numer-ical simulation. This paper presents the NUMLAB environment, a sin-gle numerical laboratory for computational and visualisa-tion applications. Its software architecture one-to-one models fundamental numerical mathematical concepts and presents a generic framework for a large class of computational appli-cations. Partial and ordinary differential equations, transient boundary value problems, linear and non-linear systems, ma-trix computations, image and signal processing, and other ap-plications all use the same software architecture and are built in a simple and interactive visual manner. NUMLAB’s one-to-one modelled mathematical concepts are illustrated with various applications.