IBM and LLNL Scientists Show How Stuff Breaks

Maxim writes: "An unprecedented billion-atom calculation has enabled a team of IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists to demonstrate a major advance in using supercomputers to simulate the strength of materials. Check out the video."

Cornell is doing something similar...

[QuantumFTL]

I am an undergraduate at Cornell University, and I use the Velocity Cluster, the largest cluster of Windows boxes in the world. It's been mentioned on slashdot before, and the system there is actually pretty cool. Anyways, I had remembered seeing that Cornell, in partnership with several other universities, was doing something very similar to this.

The page about the Cornell Computational Materials Institute can be found here [cornell.edu].

There's some pretty nifty stuff going on with that... crack propagation is an especially important problem in materials science, and it's nice to see that these large computers can be used to help solve it.