What is "nastran"

NASTRAN is a finite element analysis (FEA) program that was originally developed for NASA in the late 1960s by Stephen Burns of the University of Rochester under United States government funding for the Aerospace industry. The MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation (MSC) was one of the principal and original developers of the publicly available NASTRAN code. NASTRAN source code is integrated in a number of different software packages, which are distributed by a range of companies.