The Fundamental Technologies project was formed to improve the ease, speed, flexibility, and quality of geometry, mesh, and attribution modeling for physics-based computational simulations. For DoD weapons systems, it enables the development of numerical representations of geometry, mesh generation, and assignment of attributes needed by high-performance scalable solvers.
Capstone is a software platform to create, modify, and query geometry mesh and attribution information needed to define a digital model for physics-based simulation of complex engineering systems. Capstone supports applications including the computation of complex flow fields around air-vehicles (fixed and rotary wing), ships, and submarines; analysis and design of radio-frequency (RF) antennae systems; shock and damage modeling for ships and submarines; structural-acoustics modeling, and terrain modeling.
Geometry Capabilities - Capstone can handle arbitrarily complex three-dimensional geometries using non-uniform-B-Spline (NURBS) curves and surfaces. It supports full non-manifold geometry representations. The Capstone platform is agnostic to the details of the geometry-system (CAD) through the use of suitable abstractions for the needed geometric operations.
Meshing Capabilities - Capstone uses fully automated algorithms to generate unstructured anisotropic curvilinear meshes needed for a range of physics and discretization techniques. It generates meshes needed for complex flow fields with multiple interacting boundary-layers. Capstone-generated meshes are tightly associated with the underlying geometry model, enabling geometry-based a-posteriori mesh adaptation.
Attribution Capabilities - Capstone supports attaching information to the model geometry in an associative manner where attributes are automatically updated as geometry is edited. Coupled with tight association of the meshes and geometry, this allows robust and automated transfer of analysis attribution information to the meshes needed by the solvers.
The Capstone platform consists of a GUI-based application for traditional pre-processing workflows and analyses, as well as a powerful software development kit (SDK) with well-abstracted, compact application programming interfaces (API). The SDK provides a foundational capability, enabling geometry-based engineering design and analysis.
The CREATE-GV project was recently established to develop physics-based, high performance computing (HPC) tools to enhance ground vehicle concept development, inform requirements development, and provide data for use in trade-space analysis, with an ultimate goal to positively impact cost, schedule, and performance and significantly reduce risk for the acquisition community. The project develops software tools for analyzing ground vehicle concept designs and mobility performance of wheeled and tracked ground vehicles, covering manned and unmanned vehicle applications.
The software tools include Mercury and supplementary expansion tools that greatly enhance and extend the capabilities of Mercury. This combination of software enables virtual assessment of performance for proving ground and mission-level based mobility requirements. They are optimized for producing performance data for use in trade-space analysis, enabling consideration of numerous design trades early and often throughout the acquisition lifecycle.
Mercury, the flagship CREATE-GV product, is a physics-based co-simulation software tool for simulating proving-ground type developmental performance tests used as acquisition requirements. Through its co-simulation framework, Mercury integrates physics domains such as vehicle dynamics, powertrain, tire-soil and track-soil interaction, and driver and control models. It can automatically simulate multiple performance tests such as ride quality, discrete-obstacle shock, soft-soil mobility, sand slope climbing, maximum speed, lane change stability, and circular turn stability. Mercury utilizes detailed 3-dimensional vehicle models that include component representations for suspension, driveline, powertrain, steering systems, chassis, tires, tracks, and more.
The Mercury expansion tools include the Mobility Analysis Tool (MAT) and the Ground Vehicle Interface (GVI). MAT is a model-based computational tool for predicting mission-level mobility performance metrics used as acquisition requirements. MAT can account for a wide variety of terrain, seasonal, and weather conditions to assess the suitability of vehicles for missions in multiple regions around the globe for differing terrain types and climatic zones. GVI is a web-based user interface providing a simplified, intuitive process to launch HPC simulations using Mercury and MAT, produce performance data required for robust trade-space analysis, and enable effective model data management and long-term knowledge reuse. GVI is accessible through the HPC Portal, which is available to HPCMP users via OpenID Connect login using CAC or YubiKey authentication from any internet access point.
The CREATE-AV project is tasked to develop, deploy, and support a set of multi-disciplinary, physics-based simulation software products for the engineering workforces, supporting air vehicle acquisition programs of the services. These products are designed to exploit the capabilities of next-generation computational resources to decrease the acquisition lifecycle costs of air vehicles and support a paradigm shift to a reliance on virtual testing instead of physical testing as the primary source of decision data.
The importance of physical tests is not diminished in any way, but rather the resources are focused on validating the digital model and performance in key areas of the flight envelope. Streamlined engineering workflows and computational physics models enable the detection of design flaws and performance anomalies early in aircraft development by both government and industry professionals.
The CREATE-AV software suite includes Kestrel (fixed-wing), Helios (rotary wing), and ADAPT (conceptual design) and supports multiple key DoD initiatives including digital engineering transformation, hypersonic vehicle development and defense, aircraft modernization, and workforce development.
Kestrel is the fixed-wing high-fidelity simulation tool of the CREATE Air Vehicles project (CREATE-AV). It enables coupled multi-fidelity simulations that combine aerodynamics, thermochemisty, structural dynamics, thermodynamics, propulsion, and flight controls. Kestrel supports a variety of fixed-wing across flow regimes ranging from incompressible to hypersonic speeds and can model weapons separation such as store launches. Kestrel includes a user interface to intuitively build complex simulations and includes functionality to model unsteady aerodynamics over long time periods, such as high-fidelity trajectory simulations. It also includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) to facilitate user-supplied plug-ins that may be needed by particular DoD programs.
Helios is the rotary-wing multi-fidelity simulation tool of the CREATE-AV project. Like Kestrel, it performs multi-physics computational analysis of rotorcraft aeromechanics, coupling aerodynamics, structures, and propulsion of rotorcraft platforms. Helios is uniquely suited to model hover and forward flight performance for vertical lift air vehicles used by Army, Navy, and Air Force. Rotor wakes are resolved using a unique dual mesh paradigm, which applies structured or unstructured body-fitted meshes near the vehicle surface and adaptively refined high-order Cartesian meshes in the farfield. Helios includes an intuitive user interface for the setup of complex vehicles, and includes a mid-fidelity Cartesian-based option for quick turnaround. It supports both Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) as well as traditional CPU HPC architectures and, like Kestrel, provides a SDK to facilitate user-supplied plug-ins.
ADAPT (Aircraft Design, Analysis, Performance, and Trade-space) is CREATE-AV's aircraft conceptual design framework. ADAPT allows aircraft designers to easily integrate and use multi-disciplinary tools in a common framework, explore the aircraft design trade-space, and leverage HPC resources at the conceptual design stage.
ADAPT is comprised of three major pieces: (1) the extensible ADAPT data structure, which provides the common framework for integrating multi-disciplinary tools, (2) the ADAPT GUI, which enables conceptual designers to easily set inputs, document work, and analyze results, and (3) the ADAPT execution engine, which runs the integrated multi-disciplinary toolset on desktop or HPC machines.
The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program is an Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) program established in 1992. In October 2011, the Program transitioned to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)), and is managed by the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Since its inception, the Program has realized great success in establishing world-class, state-of-the-art, high-performance computing capabilities and expertise within the Department’s laboratories and test centers.
Under the governance of the Executive Steering Group (ESG), HPC Advisory Panel (HPCAP), and the User Advocacy Group (UAG), the HPCMP works closely with the DoD Service and Agency representatives to optimize resource allocations in line with the Department’s RDT&E and AE priorities.
Introduction
Purpose: The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) established the DoD HPCMP Acquisition Engineering (AE) Program to better support the unique workflows for the acquisition engineering, mission engineering, and test and evaluation (T&E) communities. The AE Program provides access to HPCMP compute resources, network access, and advanced software tools for modeling and simulation of DoD air, land, and sea-based weapon systems throughout all lifecycle phases, maximizing return on investment.
For inquiries regarding software tools, network, or subject matter expert (SME) support for AE efforts, please contact Jason Klepper at
AE Compute Resource Request Submission: Requests for AE compute are accepted on a continuous basis and must be submitted to
HPCMP AE Compute Resource Request Template [PDF Version]
