The teraflops, currently the world's fastest computer, performs more than one trillion mathematical operations per second. What's more, the resulting computer simulation can be explored using interactive virtual reality techniques. Simulating comet impacts provides an opportunity to test and improve the codes. Five seconds after a 1.4 kilometer-wide asteroid crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York, an impact plume containing superheated water, earth, and other debris blankets major portions of Long Island. The viewpoint is from orbital altitude from a location about 100 kilometers west of New York City looking east.
Long Island trails off in the distance.
Manhattan and Staten Islands are in the foreground. Eleven seconds after impact, Long Island and the New York shoreline are engulfed in debris and superheated steam, and much of the material in the upper portions of the impact plume is on suborbital trajectories. According to the simulation, the impact would vaporize the asteroid, deform the ocean floor, and eject hundreds of cubic miles of superheated water vapor, melted rock, and other debris into the upper atmosphere and back into space. Much of the debris would then rain down over the world for the next several hours and also form a high global cloud, says David Crawford of Sandia's Computational Physics and Mechanics Department. The shock wave from the impact would level much of the New England region.