Final Report for "Verification and Validation of Radiation Hydrodynamics for Astrophysical Applications"

Abstract

The motivation for this work is to gain experience in the methodology of verification and validation (V&V) of astrophysical radiation hydrodynamics codes. In the first period of this work, we focused on building the infrastructure to test a single astrophysical application code, Castro, developed in collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). We delivered several hydrodynamic test problems, in the form of coded initial conditions and documentation for verification, routines to perform data analysis, and a generalized regression test suite to allow for continued automated testing. Astrophysical simulation codes aim to model phenomena that elude direct experimentation. Our only direct information about these systems comes from what we observe, and may be transient. Simulation can help further our understanding by allowing virtual experimentation of these systems. However, to have confidence in our simulations requires us to have confidence in the tools we use. Verification and Validation is a process by which we work to build confidence that a simulation code is accurately representing reality. V&V is a multistep process, and is never really complete. Once a single test problem is working as desired (i.e. that problem is verified), one wants to ensure that subsequent code changes do not break that test. At the same time, one must also search for new verification problems that test the code in a new way. It can be rather tedious to manually retest each of the problems, so before going too far with V&V, it is desirable to have an automated test suite. Our project aims to provide these basic tools for astrophysical radiation hydrodynamics codes.