Project Spaceborne: NASA, HPE Team Up to Use Supercomputers for Eventual Journey to Mars

Understanding physical behaviors in harshenvironments is extremely hard, and at times,critically important. That is the situation GeneralElectric (GE) engineers faced when designing theirnew heavy-duty gas turbine generator. Gaining even 1% greater efficiency could save their electric utility customers millions of dollars andimprove GE’s world-wide competitiveness. Thekey issues involved a better understanding of the fluid dynamics and reactive flow behaviors in the turbine’s 1,500 degree Celsius combustion chambers and the interactions between the 2 to 16 individual flames in the chambers. GE Power engineers had reached the limits of theory and experiments, motivating them to apply advanced modeling and simulation.

In April 2018, researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) reported that they had accomplished the first successful three- dimensional simulations of the effects of colliding black holes carried out by using a first-order formulation of the Einstein equations.