dakota简介

The Dakota (Design Analysis Kit for Optimization and Terascale Applications) project started in 1994 as an inter-
nal research and development activity at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The original
goal was to provide a common set of optimization tools for a group of engineers solving structural analysis and
design problems. Prior to the Dakota project, there was no focused effort to archive optimization methods for
reuse on other projects. Thus, engineers found themselves repeatedly building new custom interfaces between
the engineering analysis software and optimization software. This was especially burdensome when using par-
allel computing, as each project developed a unique master program to coordinate concurrent simulations on a
network of workstations or a parallel computer. The initial Dakota toolkit provided the engineering and analysis
community at Sandia access to a variety of optimization algorithms, hiding the complexity of the optimization
software interfaces from the users. Engineers could readily switch between optimization software packages by
simply changing a few lines in a Dakota input file. In addition to structural analysis, Dakota has been applied
to computational fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, shock physics, heat transfer, electrical circuits, and many
other science and engineering models.