The radiation-hydrodynamic ICF3D code Original Research Article

We describe the 3D high temperature plasma simulation computer code ICF3D which is being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The code is portable; it runs on a variety of platforms: uniprocessors, SMPs, and MPPs. It parallelizes by decomposing physical space into disjoint subdomains and relies on message passing libraries such as MPI. ICF3D is written in the object oriented programming language C++. The mesh is unstructured and consists of a collection of hexahedra, prisms, pyramids, and/or tetrahedra. The hydrodynamics is modeled by the discontinuous finite element method which allows a natural representation of inherently discontinuous phenomena such as shocks. Continuous processes such as diffusion are modeled by conventional finite element methods. ICF3D is modular and consists of separate equation-of-state, hydrodynamic, heat conduction, and multi-group radiation transport (diffusion approximation) packages. We present results on problems relevant to Inertial Confinement Fusion which are obtained on a variety of computers, uniprocessors and MPPs.