Introduction

Overture is a set of object-oriented tools for solving computational fluid dynamics and combustion problems in complex moving geometries. It has been designed for solving problems on a structured grid or a collection of structured grids. It can use curvilinear grids, adaptive mesh refinement, and the composite overlapping grid method to represent problems involving complex domains with moving components.

Overture programs are written at a very high-level, using data-parallel array expressions in the style of HPF. They can achieve high performance (comparable to FORTRAN) thanks to a preprocessor (C++ to C++) called ROSE. Effectively, ROSE is a replacement for the expression template technique of POOMA. Overture has aggregate array operations and tightly integrated graphical features based on OpenGL. AMR++, a package that directly support adaptive mesh refinement methods, is built on top of Overture.

The following image shows the design of the overture framework. Although all of the tools from the different levels of the framework are available to the users, the ones in the higher orders (Numerics and Serial and Parallel Program interface) are used in the development of partial differential equation solvers.

Users

Overture can be used to write high-performance PDE solvers using finite-difference methods on block-structured grids, including adaptive methods such as AMR. The images in the left panel come from applications that use Overture (click on the icon to display the full image in a new window).

Documentation

• Overture Documentation
• A Primer for writing PDE Solvers with Overture

• Related Tool:

• CUBIT

Developers

Overture has been developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC); its developers were David Brown, Kyle Chand, William Henshaw, Brian Miller, Jeff Painter, Rick Pember, Bobby Philip, Dan Quinlan and Thomas Rutaganira.