Computational Resources
Automatic Differentiation Software
The specific AD tool we use for our research is ADIFOR 2.0, developed
jointly by Argonne National Laboratory and Rice University. ADIFOR
stands for Automatic Differentiation of Fortran. For more information
on ADIFOR see http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/autodiff/ADIFOR/
or http://www.cs.rice.edu/~adifor.
OVERFLOW CFD Code
OVERFLOW, from NASA Ames, is a thin-layer Navier-Stokes code that
utilizes overlapped grids. A PVM-based parallel version distributes
the computation for each grid zone onto its own processor and uses
interpolation to resolve flow field values in the overlapping regions.
The solution method is typically the ARC3D approximate factorization
method. Multigrid and low Reynolds number preconditioning have
recently been added to OVERFLOW.
OVERFLOW is a focal point of a NASA project that uses
derivatives for shape optimization and inverse problems. The
projected problems are expected to be large, and, more significantly,
need a large number of derivatives.
Hardware
Our hardware testbeds consisted of Rice's and NASA Ames's SP2 (made
available to us through the NASA/IBM/HPCCPT Consortium) and Langley's
Cray YMP.