THE PROBLEM

The Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras delivers education and research in civil engineering planning, design, construction and management activities. To help with the teaching of and research in this broad set of activities, Dr. Bhairavavajjula Rao, an Assistant Professor in the Structural Engineering Division sought a toolset with a broad set of capabilities.

While the department had a good equation solving system in place, this system only provided equation solving. Dr. Rao wanted to provide students and researchers with more capabilities without increasing their costs, so looked for a set of libraries that offered equation solving, random number generation, probability distribution functions and more. In addition to having extended functionality, Dr. Rao also needed the libraries to be easy-to-use, so that students could quickly leverage the functionality without having to learn complicated programming techniques.

THE SOLUTION

Already aware of the comprehensive set of mathematical and statistical algorithms available in the IMSL Libraries, Dr. Rao knew that the libraries would have the range of functions needed by the civil engineering department. “I used the IMSL Fortran Library and the IMSL C Library while I was a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa to develop meshless code,” said Dr. Rao. “Meshless analysis is one of my areas of expertise and based on that work, I knew that the IMSL Libraries are easy-to-use and provide a wide variety of reliable subroutines.”

While their ease of use and wide variety of reliable functions made the IMSL Libraries extremely attractive to IIT Madras, the fact that Dr. Rao could get all the functions in the libraries for less than the cost of the single equation solver they were currently using made the decision to implement the IMSL Libraries a very easy one.

Today, Dr. Rao uses the IMSL Fortran Library and the IMSL C Library for both research and teaching. “For my research in multi-scale fracture analysis of functionally graded materials, I use linear/nonlinear equation solvers, eigen system solvers, optimization problem solvers, random number generators and probability distribution functions in the IMSL Libraries,” says Dr. Rao. Functionally graded materials are very promising for applications requiring ultrahigh material performance, such as thermal barrier coatings, bone and dental implants, piezoelectric and thermoelectric devices, optical materials with graded reflective indices, and high-performance space flight structures. He also notes that the equation solvers and optimization problem solvers are very robust and provide reliable answers, which is very important for his software that can be applied in various fields of mechanics involving multi-scale analysis.

The IMSL Libraries are also proving useful to IIT Madras for teaching purposes. Dr. Rao uses the IMSL Libraries in teaching the ‘Computer Methods in Civil Engineering’ course. “Students who are new to the IMSL Libraries can quickly spend just a few minutes going through examples provided and immediately understand how various arguments are being supplied,” notes Dr. Rao. “Our students appreciate these tools because they are so easy to learn and use.”

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

“By using IMSL Numerical Libraries I can definitely say that 50% of my research time is saved by simply calling functions like linear/nonlinear equation solvers and random number generators instead of coding and testing these subroutines myself,” said Dr. Rao. “I’ve looked at alternatives and it’s difficult to imagine one that could provide the breadth and depth of functions as the IMSL Libraries.”