MyPYTHIA: a recommendation portal for scientific software and services

We outline the design of a recommendation system (MyPYTHIA) implemented as a Web portal. MyPYTHIA's design objectives include evaluating the quality and performance of scientific software on Grid platforms, creating knowledge about which software and computational services should be selected for solving particular problems, selecting parameters of software (or of computational services) based on user-specified computational objectives, providing access to performance data and knowledge bases over the Web and enabling recommendations for targeted application domains. MyPYTHIA uses a combination of statistical analysis, pattern extraction techniques and a database of software performance to map feature-based representations of problem instances to appropriate software. MyPYTHIA's open architecture allows the user to customize it for conducting individual case studies. We describe the architecture as well as several scientific domains of knowledge enabled by such case studies. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.