National Supercomputer Nurion Solves the Biggest Mystery in the Architecture Field

Successful Simulation of Tacoma Bridge Collapse Incident
Major Achievement in Fluid Mechanics, Confirming 'Poroelastic Properties' Effect
Utilized 30% of Nurion Resources for 3 Months of Computation

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] On November 7, 1940, in Washington State, USA, a large suspension bridge (Tacoma Bridge) that had been completed less than four months earlier collapsed without any apparent reason such as poor construction or an explosion caused by terrorism. Subsequently, scientists estimated that the collapse was caused by the 'aeroelastic phenomenon,' where the structure deforms due to aerodynamic effects. Among bridge designers, it has been cited as a representative example of faulty design and served as a 'lesson from past mistakes.' However, the exact process of how the bridge's design caused it to be subjected to wind resistance and how this force led to the collapse had not been confirmed. Recently, however, a domestic research team succeeded in reproducing the collapse process of this bridge using a supercomputer, attracting attention.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) announced on the 26th that it had successfully conducted such a simulation in collaboration with Seoul National University.

The research team used up to 160,000 CPU cores on the national supercomputer Nurion for three months, creating conditions most similar to the actual event to analyze the bridge's vibration and collapse mechanism caused by wind, thereby reproducing the entire process of the Tacoma Bridge collapse accident. This involved high-performance computing at about 7.7 petaflops (7,700 trillion calculations per second), accounting for approximately 30% of Nurion's capacity.

The bridge is known to have moved in a sequence of vertical vibrations followed by torsional vibrations due to wind influence while stationary, leading to its collapse. Through supercomputing, the research team confirmed that aerodynamic forces exerted by the wind caused torsion in the bridge, and over time, the aerodynamic forces and the bridge's torsion amplified each other.

Image of the Tacoma Bridge recreated by the national supercomputer No. 5 'Nurion'.

The flow in this simulation falls within the turbulent flow regime. Turbulence refers to chaotic and irregular air or water flow, generally occurring at high speeds. To simulate the entire area of the Tacoma Bridge as turbulent flow, more than 13 billion grids are required. Such a simulation is impossible without an ultra-high-performance computer, i.e., a supercomputer.

Professor Choi Hae-cheon of Seoul National University stated, “With the advancement of supercomputers, we can now understand important flow phenomena that were previously unidentifiable.” Jung Min-jung, Director of KISTI's Supercomputing Application Center, said, “We reproduced the historical accident of the Tacoma Bridge collapse through supercomputing simulation. When the 6th-generation supercomputer, which is 23 times more powerful than the 5th generation, is introduced, we expect to solve previously unsolvable challenges through ultra-large-scale simulations.”

The results of this study were published on the 23rd of last month in the national academic journal in the field of fluid mechanics, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.