| CSAR | |
| Label1: | Founded |
| Data1: | 1997 |
| Label2: | Location |
| Data2: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Label3: | Department |
| Data3: | Computational Science and Engineering |
| Label4: | Goal |
| Data4: | Develop accurate computation models of solid-state rocket propellant systems |
| Label5: | Staff |
| Data5: | Approx. 80 Faculty, Staff, and Students |
| Label6: | Research Areas |
| Data6: | Fluids and Combustion Structures and Materials Computer Science System Integration Uncertainty Integration |
The Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) is an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is part of the United States Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. CSAR's goal is to accurately predict the performance, reliability, and safety of solid propellant rockets.[1]
CSAR was founded in 1997 as part of the Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. The goal of this program is to "enable accurate prediction of the performance, reliability, and safety of complex physical systems through computational simulation." CSAR extends this motive into the realm of solid rocket propellants, specifically those used by the Space Shuttle.[2]
CSAR aims to be able to simulate entire rocket systems, under normal and abnormal situations. This involves highly accurate modeling of components and dynamics of fuel flow and other environmental factors. Modeling this requires large computational power, on the order of thousands of processors. Development of the computational infrastructure is critical in achieving their goal.
There are several fields researched by CSAR.[3] Physical simulations are implemented in CSAR's Rocstar software suite.
Physical simulations are performed using CSAR's Rocstar suite of numerical solver applications. Rocstar was built by CSAR, and is designed to run efficiently on massively parallel computers. Implementation of Rocstar is done in MPI and is entirely compatible with Adaptive MPI. Rocstar is currently in its third version, Rocstar 3. Documentation on using Rocstar 3 is available through a User's Guide.
CSAR uses a number of supercomputing resources for their simulations. Along with CSAR, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CSAR takes advantage of the computing environment provided by NCSA for many simulations. The university's department of Computational Science and Engineering has a supercomputing cluster known as Turing, which is also utilized by CSAR.[4]
The computation environment used by CSAR takes advantage of work done by the University of Illinois' Parallel Programming Lab, in particular Charm++ and Adaptive MPI.[5] These parallel programming frameworks allow for application development that scales easily to thousands of processors, which allows for highly complex computations to finish quickly. The Run-time system employed by both Charm++ and AMPI has two primary features that are used by CSAR's software: load-balancing, which helps improve performance by keeping work distributed evenly across all processors, and checkpointing, which allows a lengthy computation to be saved and restarted without having to start over.
Using these highly parallel tools, CSAR's developers have built a number of components which are able to simulate various physical phenomena related to rocket propulsion. Combined, they provide a complete simulation environment. Below is a list of all the Rocstar modules and links to their respective users guides.