Supercomputer's Asteroid Simulations

The Cielo supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory works on classified nuclear weapons physics problems. However, it is sometimes used to do unclassified science when a computer model is so large that it can't be run on a smaller platform. One of the unclassified models that ran recently on Cielo was a model by Robert Weaver of Theoretical Design Applications Physics that looked at how one megaton nuclear energy source might effect the granular asteriod Itokawa as a way to prevent a potential asteriod impact with Earth.

Transcript

00:00:08 [Music] one of the simulations we're working on right now is an asteroid mitigation uh calculation we think asteroids are really uh conglomerates of rocks just held Loosely together by gravity if one of these objects is discovered at a very short notice time say a few months away and is on an earth Crossing

00:00:43 trajectory uh there could be potentially uh Devastation on a worldwide scale what we're looking at is calculations uh that perform real hydr dynamics on these objects uh in order to understand whether we can uh use an energy s course of this magnitude to really disrupt this asteroid and prevent the hazard to the to the entire Earth this geometry is representative of what

00:01:11 we believe the internal structure of an asteroid is this is actually in the shape of the iawa asteroid these are all granite rocks the entire uh size of this asteroid is half a kilometer it's 500 M from end to end it's about 250 M uh uh from side to side and what you're looking at now is the 3D calculation that's running on cello where I've placed a uh 1 Megaton energy source at

00:01:36 the surface on the long side of this asteroid uh and we're watching the propagation of the shock wave uh from the detonation Point through the asteroid material uh imparting momentum uh via the shock uh interactions with the Rocks uh to the individual rocks and one rock hits the next Rock and as a shock wave moves through ultimately this one Megaton black last will disrupt all

00:02:02 of the rocks in the rock pile of this asteroid uh and If This Were A Earth Crossing asteroid would uh fully mitigate the hazard represented by the initial asteroid itself uh the calculations I'm running now on cello in 3D um are state-of-the-art calculations on 32,000 processors this this is mind bog to me uh we've never run on

00:02:32 this many processors uh the the code is acting normally running very well uh and in fact we're able to run these calculations on this machine that we were not able to run on any other previous machine