Simulating the Formation and Evolution of Behind Armor Debris Fields

Under the auspices of a DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Capability Applications Project (CAP), researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) evaluated the performance of the CTH shock physics code[1] on the Opteron cluster recently installed at the ARL Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC). This system has 2304 processors for batch processing, each running at a clock speed of 2.2 GHz. Scalability trials were conducted using up to 2048 processors and involved the simulation of the yawed, oblique impact of a long rod penetrator with a thin plate. This case has been used in the past as a standard benchmark in assessing the scalability of CTH on many other scalable systems deployed by HPCMP[^2-8]. The scalability of CTH on the Opteron cluster was studied for both fixed and adaptive meshes. After the scalability study was completed, CTH simulations were conducted to evaluate the potential to use shock physics simulations to augment experimental data in behind armor debris applications. These simulations were conducted for both fixed and adaptive meshes using 512-2048 processors. A variation of a fracture model currently under development at ARL was also evaluated. This paper describes the scalability of CTH on the Opteron cluster and the results of a set of simulations to model the formation and evolution of behind armor debris fields.