The goal of this program is to "enable accurate prediction of the performance, reliability, and safety of complex physical systems through computational simulation."

[4] The computation environment used by CSAR takes advantage of work done by the University of Illinois' Parallel Programming Lab, in particular Charm++ and Adaptive MPI.

[5] These parallel programming frameworks allow for application development that scales easily to thousands of processors, which allows for highly complex computations to finish quickly.

The Run-time system employed by both Charm++ and AMPI has two primary features that are used by CSAR's software: load-balancing, which helps improve performance by keeping work distributed evenly across all processors, and checkpointing, which allows a lengthy computation to be saved and restarted without having to start over.

Using these highly parallel tools, CSAR's developers have built a number of components which are able to simulate various physical phenomena related to rocket propulsion.