[andrewwharton]

I came across a nice video/presentation from some guys at SpaceX on using GPUs to model and visualise the fluid flows inside rocket engines (specifically the Raptor engine) and around spacecraft during reentry, as well as a good explanation of how they do it efficiently using adaptive grids. Their explanations are quite approachable as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txk-VO1hzBY

[Bromskloss]

Do they have code available?

[tobmlt]

Note the citations at the end of the video (44:30 mark ). Code from some of the original research the spacex stuff was based on, adaptive wavelet collocation methods, used to be online in a bitbucket repo here: https://git.plgrid.pl/scm/tmh/wavelet-original-code.git

Unfortunately it seems to have been taken down. A shame - it was really everything! But as a huge CFD library research code it is a bit hard to sift through anyway.

I'd recommend the papers then. Stuff like this, from these guys (Jonathan Regele and Oleg Vasileyev), led to the Spacex software: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239395184_An_adapti...

An earlier starting point might be something like this: http://ms.mcmaster.ca/kevla/pdf/articles/Kevlahan_SISC_v26.p...

This line of work dates back to the mid 90s as you will see from the sources.

[tankenmate]

Very unlikely, this software is an enormous commercial advantage. Not so much the cost in and of itself of the software but for the advantage of speeding up development of engines, etc through shortened iterations. SpaceX developed this because they couldn't find any reasonable solutions on the market already. I suspect that reasonable not only included cost and availability but also the ability to adjust the product to their needs.