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.