Chemora: A Programming Framework for Physics

The fundamental difficulty with scientific software is that the existing languages are either too generalpurpose, too low-level, or both. Thus, physics equations are entangled with the way they are implemented and optimized. Because everything is coupled, it is difficult to adapt to algorithm or hardware advances. More importantly, it means that researchers cannot specialize as easily. In principle, it should be possible to independently specify (1) the scientific equations to be solved; (2) the type of grids; (3) the numerical methods, e.g. time integrators, elliptic solvers; (4) the execution platform (desktop, accelerated cluster, etc.); (5) performance goals, e.g. time, power, etc.