OverviewDigital Material is an extensible modeling and software infrastructure to support the representation and simulation of material structure and evolution across multiple length and time scales. Such an environment must balance the need for high performance against the need for lightweight prototyping and interrogation. It must be able to integrate a variety of programs and tools into a consistent and seamless framework for multiscale materials simulation. And it must support code reuse across scales through appropriate decomposition of functionality among collections of collaborating objects and modules. Digital Material is intended to function in several roles:
- as a material representation supporting descriptions of features across many length scales (and compositions of those features into virtual material samples)
- as a programming environment supporting simulation and analysis of material samples at various scales
- as a problem-solving environment supporting interactive control and interrogation of simulations, data, etc.
- the use of a two-level software architecture, combining low-level numerical kernels written in compiled languages and a high-level interpreted control and integration layer written in the interpreted programming language Python
- the use of Design Patterns and related programming techniques to decompose simulation functionality among collaboration objects, in order to support flexible program composition
- the development of object models for the hierarchy of structures arising in materials, separated into explicitly modeled geometric components and implicitly modeled attributes, so as to support the migration of information across scales.
- Digital Material Software
- "Digital Material: a Framework for Multiscale Modeling of Defects in Solids" (overview paper presented at the Materials Research Society meeting, Fall 1998; published in C.R. Myers et al., Mat. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc., Vol. 538, p. 509 (1999)).
Questions or comments? Contact James Sethna.