New Software Acquisitions

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to expand the use of the TRACC cluster. NHTSA's Human Injury Research Division (HIRD) does a lot of work related to real world crash reconstruction. For reconstruction purposes, HIRD uses two different software modules: MADYMO and modeFrontier. Optimization is performed using modeFrontier. Since optimization studies require a lot of simulations, HIRD will use TRACC's cluster with MADYMO and modeFrontier licenses that can concurrently run 20 + MADYMO jobs. During this quarter, TRACC has acquired both codes.

MADYMO has been installed on the cluster and is now operational. In addition, a combined effort between the NHTSA, MADYMO, LS-DYNA and TRACC organizations have succeeded in getting the coupling between MADYMO and LS-DYNA working on the cluster computer. NHTSA is currently using the coupled codes for analysis. The software license agreement for modeFRONTIER was signed late in the quarter and TRACC's system administrator completed installation on the cluster. NHTSA will evaluate the code against their benchmark problems.

The need for a high performance pre- and post-processor with state-of-the-art mesh generation capabilities led TRACC to purchase the Hypermesh/HyperView (with HyperGraph and MotionView) software suite. The mesh generation capabilities of Hypermesh are particularly suited to thin wall structures, such as automobiles and steel bridges, which is where we would find the most use. The software has been installed and tested on the cluster. It is now available to our user base.