Shown is the time evolution of the comet. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Caltech performed this simulation on the Paragon. Fragment of the comet Shoemaker -Levy 9 during its impact with the Jovian atmosphere. This simulation was performed on the Paragon using a 3-D smooth particle hydrodynamics algorithm. Colors represent the logarithm of the projected density of the cometary material and bow shock in the atmosphere.
Particle methods are useful for studying an enormous variety of systems.
We have shown that treecodes can be implemented successfully on a variety of message-passing parallel computers, and actually achieve the high performance that these machines promise. Tree-based codes can solve a very general class of problems that can be expected to grow in importance as the need for spatial adaptivity becomes necessary for the simulation of ever more difficult problems. Acknowledgments Access to the Intel Paragon was provided by the National Science Foundation's Center for Research on Parallel Computation.