Engineering

Disasters at sea trigger ship-safety advances

When one of the world's largest container ships crashed into the bank of the Suez Canal in 2021, a major gateway for global trade became blocked with an estimated $9.6 billion in daily commerce being held up.

Engineering

Nuclear expansion failure shows simulations require change

The widespread adoption of nuclear power was predicted by computer simulations more than four decades ago but the continued reliance on fossil fuels for energy shows these simulations need improvement, a new study has shown.

Energy & Green Tech

New catalysts for solar hydrogen production

Finding sustainable and clean fuels is crucial in today's global energy and climate crisis. One promising candidate that is increasingly gaining interest is hydrogen. However, today's industrial hydrogen production still ...

page 2 from 10

Computer simulation

A computer simulation, a computer model or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical modeling of many natural systems in physics (computational physics), chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those systems, or to observe their behavior.

Computer simulations vary from computer programs that run a few minutes, to network-based groups of computers running for hours, to ongoing simulations that run for days. The scale of events being simulated by computer simulations has far exceeded anything possible (or perhaps even imaginable) using the traditional paper-and-pencil mathematical modeling: over 10 years ago, a desert-battle simulation, of one force invading another, involved the modeling of 66,239 tanks, trucks and other vehicles on simulated terrain around Kuwait, using multiple supercomputers in the DoD High Performance Computer Modernization Program; a 1-billion-atom model of material deformation (2002); a 2.64-million-atom model of the complex maker of protein in all organisms, a ribosome, in 2005; and the Blue Brain project at EPFL (Switzerland), began in May 2005, to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA