The development of a distributed computing environment for the design and modeling of plasma spectroscopy experiments

The design and analysis of plasma spectroscopy experiments can be significantly complicated by relatively routine computational tasks arising from the massive amount of data encountered in the experimental design and analysis stages of the work. Difficulties in obtaining, computing, manipulating and visualizing the information represent not simply an issue of convenience -- they have a very real limiting effect on the final quality of the data and on the potential for arriving at meaningful conclusions regarding an experiment. We describe ongoing work in developing a portable UNIX environment shell with the goal of simplifying and enabling these activities for the plasma-modeling community. Applications to the construction of atomic kinetics models and to the analysis of x-ray transmission spectroscopy will be shown.