The Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) is an

interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...

research group at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, and is part of the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

Advanced Simulation and Computing Program The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...

. CSAR's goal is to accurately predict the performance, reliability, and safety of solid propellant rockets.CSAR Homepage
Retrieved October 10, 2008 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 propellant Rocket propellant is the reaction mass of a rocket. This reaction mass is ejected at the highest achievable velocity from a rocket engine A rocket engine uses stored rocket propellants as the reaction mass for forming a high-speed propuls ...

s, specifically those used by the

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program na ...

. About CSAR
Retrieved October 10, 2008 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.

Areas of research

There are several fields researched by CSAR.
Retrieved October 10, 2008 Physical simulations are implemented in CSAR's Rocstar software suite. * Fluids and combustion - The study of how a rocket's fuels are ignited and directed in such a way as to provide thrust. ** Multiphase Flow ** Turbulence Modeling ** Multiscale Acceleration (via "time zooming") ** Propellant Morphology/characterization ** Propellant combustion modeling * Structures and Materials - Analysis of the physical structure of a rocket ** Constitutive and damage modeling ** Crack propagation ** Multiscale materials modeling ** Molecular modeling of material interfaces ** Space-time discontinuous Galerkin Methods *

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

- Development of advanced simulation and visualization tools ** Parallel programming environments ** Parallel I/O ** Parallel performance modeling and prediction ** Meshing ** Hybrid geometric/topological mesh partitioner ** Visualization * System Integration - Bringing the available tools and resources together in an efficient manner ** Object-oriented integration framework ** Flexible parallel orchestration ** Stable component coupling and time-stepping ** Accurate and conservative data transfer based on common refinement ** Stable and efficient surface propagation *

Uncertainty Quantification Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is the science of quantitative characterization and reduction of uncertainties in both computational and real world applications. It tries to determine how likely certain outcomes are if some aspects of the system a ...

- Determining accuracy and confidence in simulation results ** Clustering techniques for sampling-based Uncertainty Quantification

Computation environment

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 MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...

and is entirely compatible with Adaptive MPI. Rocstar is currently in its third version, Rocstar 3. Documentation on using Rocstar 3 is available through
User's Guide
CSAR uses a number of supercomputing resources for their simulations. Along with CSAR, the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

is located at the

. 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 a
Turing
which is also utilized by CSAR.
Retrieved October 11, 2008 The computation environment used by CSAR takes advantage of work done by the University of Illinois
Parallel Programming Lab
in particular

Charm++ Charm++ is a parallel object-oriented programming paradigm based on C++ and developed in the Parallel Programming Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Charm++ is designed with the goal of enhancing programmer productivity ...

and Adaptive MPI.Parallel Programming Lab: Rocket Simulation
Retrieved October 11, 2008 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 In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile t ...

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.

Events

* On 11–12 June 2007, UIUC's

Computational Science and Engineering Computational science and engineering (CSE) is a relatively new discipline that deals with the development and application of computational models and simulations, often coupled with high-performance computing, to solve complex physical problems ...

department, home of CSAR, hosted a workshop on

. Over 40 people attended, and lectures were given b
Habib Najm
an

* On 13 July 2007, CSAR held their International Symposium on Solid Rocket Modeling and Simulation, which featured speakers from CSAR, Japan's

JAXA The is the Japanese national air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into orb ...

, and France's SNPE