MaRDI Open Interfaces

The project is not active currently (August 2026)

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.

       
A Traditional pairwise bindings
B Decoupled bindings via Open Interfaces

This project is the part of the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI).

Installation and Documentation

Please refer to the documentation at https://mardi4nfdi.github.io/open-interfaces/ for deeper view on the goals and implementation details as well as installation instructions, tutorials, and API reference.

Support and Contact

MaRDI Open Interfaces is an open source academic project. Please use the issue tracker for bug reports and feature requests and asking questions.

License

Citing

If you MaRDI Open Interfaces, please consider citing this paper:

@Article{KabanovEtAl2025,
  author    = {Kabanov, Dmitry I. and Rave, Stephan and Ohlberger, Mario},
  journal   = {Journal of Open Research Software},
  title     = {Improving Interoperability in Scientific Computing via {MaRDI Open Interfaces}},
  year      = {2025},
  issn      = {2049-9647},
  volume    = {13},
  doi       = {10.5334/jors.569},
  publisher = {Ubiquity Press, Ltd.},
}

Funding

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]”.