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NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division World-class modeling, simulation, and supercomputing in support of the NASA mission

Cart3D

Cart3D is a high-fidelity flow analysis package for conceptual and preliminary aerodynamic design. Named NASA Software of the Year in 2002, Cart3D has continued to evolve through the years, remaining a mainstay for critical NASA missions today. Applications range from modeling and simulation for spacecraft design and launch vehicle analysis, to simulations to minimize sonic boom in next-generation aircraft, to probabilistic asteroid risk modeling and long-distance blast simulation.

One of NASA’s leading sources of aerodynamic simulation data, Cart3D enables users to perform high-fidelity steady and time-dependent aerodynamic simulations of complex vehicles. The software is highly automated so that geometry acquisition and mesh generation can usually be performed within minutes on modern workstations and laptops. The package features:

  • Fully-integrated output-based mesh adaptation using the method of adjoint-weighted residuals
  • Utilities for geometry import, surface modeling and intersection, mesh generation, and post-processing of results
  • A fully integrated and richly featured shape design and optimization framework

In addition, Cart3D is designed to accommodate the diverse heterogeneous environments of a widespread user base with minimal assumptions about operating environments. The flow and adjoint solvers demonstrate excellent scalability to thousands processors. The software makes use of multi-processors in shared memory computing environments and the flow solver comes pre-built with a number of backends for optimal performance on distributed HPC hardware.

Advanced Features

Cart3D includes the following advanced features:

  • Component-based surface modeling approach.
  • Automatic mesh generation that produces topologically unstructured, adaptively refined, Cartesian meshes around any geometry or configuration.
  • Two flow simulation solver options for single-node and distributed memory builds supporting both steady and time-accurate simulations.
  • Fully automated adjoint-driven mesh adaptation for steady simulations.
  • Pre- and post-processing file integration, overgrid, and autoinput tools for Cart3D triangulation.
  • Numerous post-processing options, including volume/surface visualization and sophisticated options for extraction of force & moment and data on any collection of geometry.