Software Quality Assurance and Code Verification in Computational Simulation

Note: The presentation and recording are only available to NAFEMS members.

Overview

Computer simulations are being increasingly relied upon to inform management decisions ranging from product innovation to certification of complex, high-consequence systems. Verification and validation (V&V) are the primary means to assess the numerical and physics modeling accuracy, respectively, in computational simulation. Code verification assesses the reliability of the software coding and the numerical algorithms used in obtaining a computational solution, while solution verification addresses numerical error estimation of the computational solution for a specified set of conditions for a system of interest. Validation assesses the accuracy of a mathematical model as compared to experimentally measured response quantities. Software developers are responsible for software quality assurance and code verification of their software packages. Developers include commercial software companies, software project teams within larger organizations, and open-source software communities. This presentation briefly discussed common practices of software quality assurance, but the focus was on code verification procedures. The common practice in code verification testing has been to compare benchmark solutions with computational software results. Over the last three decades, the computational fluid dynamics community has shown that a more informative procedure to code verification is the determination of the observed order of numerical convergence of the discretized solution. Recommendations are made to improve the reliability of code verification testing in the future.

Webinar Recording (WebEx)

This webinar was available for free to the engineering analysis community, as part of NAFEMS' efforts to bring the community together online.

About our speakers ...

Dr. William Oberkampf has 50 years of experience in research and development in fluid dynamics, heat transfer, flight dynamics, and solid mechanics. After his completion of graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame in 1970, he was on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin until 1979. From 1979 until 2007 he worked at Sandia National Laboratories in both staff and management positions. During the last 25 years, Dr. Oberkampf emphasized research and development in methodologies and procedures for verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification for a wide variety of applications. He has over 185 journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and reports, and has taught 60 short courses in the field of VVUQ. He and Prof. Chris Roy co-authored the book "Verification and Validation in Scientific Computing" published by Cambridge University Press. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and NAFEMS.

Dr Steve Howell is the Technical Director at Abercus, a consultancy specialising in advanced engineering simulation – computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), bespoke software and teaching/training – and its application in the energy sector. He is a chartered engineer with 25 years of experience in the field of computational fluid dynamics, both with commercially available codes for industrial applications and the design and development of bespoke CFD codes.