Extending Post-Processing and Runtime Capabilities of the CTH Shock Physics Code

CTH is a multi-material, large deformation, strong shock wave, solid mechanics code that runs on most UNIX workstations and MPP supercomputers. CTH is one of the most heavily used computational structural mechanics codes on DoD High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. While CTH includes some internal graphics capabilities, it is preferable to take advantage of widely used scientific visualization packages like EnSight and ParaView to analyze the results of calculations. A new method has been devised that extends the capabilities of CTH to allow three dimensional polygonal models to be written directly from a running calculation in a format compatible to both EnSight and ParaView. Additionally, an interpreter for the scripting language Python has been embedded into CTH, and it’s post-processor Spymaster. Embedded Python allows for almost limitless, parallel capabilities to be added that do not require a recompilation or relinking of the CTH executable. Examples of these capabilities include one and two way code coupling, and Behind Armor Debris (BAD) applications.