At Oak Ridge, a car crash on the World Wide Web

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using a massively parallel computer to model car crashes as part of a project to develop vehicles that protect their inhabitants while getting triple the gas mileage of today´s models. Oak Ridge´s Center for Computational Sciences modeled a 50 percent offset crash of two Ford Tauruses moving at 35 miles per hour on an Intel Paragon. The simulation, which took days to run on a serial supercomputer, completed in about eight hours on the Paragon, using a finite element model code that was ported to Oak Ridge´s parallel machine. In addition to using new hardware and software that speeds the modeling process, the center is also sharing its results in a new way, by posting them on its World Wide Web site. In fact, the Web has become an important channel for internal and external communication at Oak Ridge, as well as throughout the Department of Energy and the other federal government agencies involved with its High Performance Computing and Communications initiative. Posting images and animations along with text on the Web allows other researchers, project partners, and in some cases the general public to share the benefits of visualization. The Web´s hyperlink capabilities also allow a user to quickly learn about other projects at Oak Ridge, as well as at other national labs and throughout the community of federal agencies and contractors working within the HPCC community