MaRDI Open Interfaces is a project aiming to improve interoperability in scientific computing by removing two hurdles that computational scientists usually face in their daily work.
These hurdles are the following. First, numerical solvers are often implemented in different programming languages. Second, these solvers have potentially significantly diverging interfaces in terms of function names, order of function arguments, and the invocation order. Therefore, when a computational scientist wants to switch from one solver to another, it could take non-negligible effort in code modification and testing for the correctness.
Open Interfaces aim to alleviate these problems by providing automatic data marshalling between different languages and a set of interfaces for typical numerical problems such as integration of differential equations and optimization.
This project is the part of the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI).
This figure shows the software architecture of the MaRDI Open Interfaces. There are two principal decoupled parts. The left part is user-facing and allows a user to request an implementation of some numerical procedure and then invoke different functions in this implementation to conduct computations using a unified interface (Gateway) that hides discrepancies between different implementations. The other part (on the right) is completely hidden from the user and works with an implementation of the interface. Particularly, it loads the implementation and its adapter and converts user data to the native data for the implementation.
The Python bindings and implementations of the interfaces are available from Python Package Index (PyPI) and can be installed using
pip install openinterfacesExamples are provided in the examples directory in this repository.
Documentation explaining some of these examples is available here:
https://mardi4nfdi.github.io/open-interfaces/.
This work is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC 2044-390685587, “Mathematics Münster: Dynamics–Geometry–Structure” and the National Research Data Infrastructure, project number 460135501, NFDI 29/1 “MaRDI – Mathematical Research Data Initiative [Mathematische Forschungsdateninitiative]”.