BANDIT in NASTRAN

BANDIT has been implemented into the NASTRAN April '83 release. It is now a permanent feature in NASTRAN and will be included in all future releases for all four computing machines (IBM, CDC, UNIVAC, and VAX). Originally BANDIT operated as a preprocessor of NASTRAN. It read the NASTRAN input cards and produced a set of resequencing (SEOGP) cards that would greatly reduce the computational time required by the matrix decomposition module of NASTRAN for a large structure. In the past, many computer centers had installed BANDIT in their systems together with the NASTRAN program. The user would run the BANDIT program and NASTRAN as if they were one program (or two separated programs depending on how the two programs were actually tied together in the computer systems). In some cases, the user was required to pass the input cards and the output SEQGP cards between the two programs, and n others, the data was manipulated through the use of cataloged disc files. Although there is nothing wrong with this BANDIT-NASTRAN arrangement, there are, however, several shortcomings which are mentioned in this paper. The BANDIT in the NASTRAN April '83 release has removed all the deficiencies, and it comes in one version applicable to the four computing machines.