English: Led by Eric Nielsen, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley, a team of scientists and engineers used Summit to simulate retropropulsion for landing humans on Mars.

The team used its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code called FUN3D to model a vehicle’s Martian descent. CFD applications use large systems of equations to simulate the small-scale interactions of fluids (including gases) during flow and turbulence—in this case, to capture the aerodynamic effects created by the landing vehicle and the atmosphere.

On Summit, the team modeled the lander at multiple points in its 6- to 7-minute descent. To characterize the flow behaviors across speeds ranging from supersonic to subsonic, researchers ran ensembles (suites of individual simulations) to resolve fluid dynamics at a resolution of up to 10 billion elements with as much as 200 terabytes of information stored per run.

Read more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2019/10/10/summit-simulates-how-humans-...

Credit: NASA