Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.

Massively parallel processing computer technology offers the potential to perform complex three dimensional numerical simulations of blast events in a production environment. In an attempt to evaluate this technology in simulating blast phenomena, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) adapted one of its blast modeling codes to the Thinking Machines CM-2 (and later CM-200) architecture. The code, which was adapted to the Connection Machine (CM), is BRL-01 D, a quasi-one dimensional, finite difference, single material, polytropic gas fluid dynamics code. This code is primarily used for simulating flow in shock tubes and blast simulators and has been reconfigured for the Connection Machine using the CM Fortran programming language. The performance of the code was measured on the CM for a variety of problem sizes and compiler options, and the performance was compared to that of the original Fortran 77 code on a single processor of a Cray X-MP. The optimum performance of the code on one eighth of a maximum configuration CM-200 is 2.5 times greater than that of the original code on a single processor of a Cray X-MP. The code also proved to be perfectly scalable on the CM architecture, allowing BRL to extrapolate a factor of 20 speedup over the Cray X-MP for a maximum configuration of CM-200. nuclear explosion simulation, shock tubes, computer programming.

Recently, there have been significant advances in the fields of high-enthalpy hypersonic flows, high-temperature gas physics, and chemistry shock propagation in various media, industrial and medical applications of shock waves, and shock-tube technology. This series contains all the papers and lectures of the 19th International Symposium on Shock Waves held in Marseille in 1993. They are published in four topical volumes, each containing papers on related topics, and preceded by an overview written by a leading international expert. The volumes may be purchased independently.