CGNS (CFD General Notation System)
is a collection of
conventions, along with software implementing those conventions, for the
storage and retrieval of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) data.
The CGNS system is designed to facilitate the exchange of data between
sites and applications, as well as to help stabilize the archiving of
fluid dynamic data.
In today's environment, it is important in many technical arenas to
maintain detailed records of scientific computations.
CGNS was designed to help promote a long-lasting and extensible standard
for this purpose.
Many companies and institutions choose to adopt the CGNS standard in
order to increase productivity by (1) reducing the time required to
translate between data created and used by different applications, and
(2) increasing the quality, longevity, and re-usability of archived
data.
The CGNS standard is a conceptual entity established by the documentation. The CGNS software is a physical product supplied to enable writing and reading data according to this standard. All CGNS software is completely free and open to anyone. By using the supplied software, it is relatively easy for users to adhere to most of the standard described in detail in this document.
The CGNS project originated during 1994 through a series of meetings
that addressed improved transfer of NASA technology to industry.
A principal impediment in this process was the disparity in I/O formats
employed by various flow codes, grid generators, and other utilities,
and CGNS was conceived as a means to promote "plug-and-play" CFD.
An agreement was reached to develop CGNS at
Boeing
, under NASA Contract
NAS1-20267, with active participation by a team of CFD researchers from
NASA's Langley
,
Lewis (now Glenn)
, and
Ames
Research Centers,
McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now part of Boeing), and
Boeing Commercial Airplane
Group .
This team, which was joined by ICEM
CFD Engineering Corporation
of Berkeley, California
in 1997, undertook the core of the development.
However, in the spirit of creating a completely open and broadly
accepted standard, all interested parties were encouraged to
participate; the US Air Force
and
Arnold Engineering
Development Center
were notably present.
From the beginning, the purpose was to develop a system that could be
distributed freely, including all documentation, software and source
code.
This goal has now been fully realized; further, control of CGNS has been
completely transferred to a public forum known as the CGNS Steering
Committee.
The principal target is the data normally associated with compressible viscous flow (i.e., the Navier-Stokes equations), but the standard is also applicable to subclasses such as Euler and potential flows. The initial release addressed multi-zone grids, flow fields, boundary conditions, and zone-to-zone connection information, as well as a number of auxiliary items, such as non-dimensionalization, reference states, and equation set specifications. Extensions incorporated since then include unstructured mesh, connections to geometry definition, time-dependent flow, and support for multiple species and chemistry.
It is worth noting that extensibility is a fundamental design characteristic of the system, which in principal could be used for other disciplines of computational field physics, such as acoustics or electromagnetics, given the willingness of the cognizant scientific community to define the conventions.
The standard format, or paper convention, part of CGNS consists of two fundamental pieces. The first, known as the Standard Interface Data Structures (SIDS), describes in detail the intellectual content of the information to be stored. It defines, for example, the precise meaning of a "boundary condition". The second, known as the SIDS File Mapping, defines the exact location in a CGNS file where the data is to be stored.
The implementation, or software, part of CGNS likewise consists of two separate entities. CGNS files are read and written by a stand-alone database manager, either ADF (Advanced Data Format) or HDF (Hierarchical Data Format). The database manager implements a tree-like data structure, as a binary file. Since the format of this file is completely controlled by the database manager, and since ADF and HDF are both written in ANSI C (Fortran wrappers are provided), these files and the database manager itself are portable to any environment that supports ANSI C. Both ADF and HDF are available separately and constitute useful tools for the storage of large quantities of scientific data.
The underlying database manager, however, implements no knowledge of CFD or of the File Mapping. To simplify access to CGNS files, a second layer of software known as the Mid-Level Library is provided. This layer is in effect an API, or Application Programming Interface for CFD. The API incorporates knowledge of the CFD data structures, their meaning and their location in the file, enabling applications such as flow codes and grid generators to access the data in familiar terms. The API is therefore the piece of the CGNS system most visible to applications developers. Like the ADF and HDF database managers, the Mid-Level Library is written in ANSI C; all public API routines have Fortran counterparts.
This document includes the following sections: