The ability to use computational models for engineering applications has advanced so much in just the last decade. Mechanical engineer Lee Glascoe of the Computational Engineering Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used advanced 3-D modeling to ensure that soil filter design standards for dams dating back over 50 years are still valid in the event of an earthquake.

"The advances in numerical techniques and the advances in high-performance computing allow us to address problems that we just simply could not address 10 years ago, let alone twenty years ago. I remember when I first started at the laboratories, I actually started at Los Alamos before coming to Lawrence Livermore, and I was just amazed that we were able to model anything in three dimensions! Everybody’s doing that now, but that next breakthrough in high-performance computing really can make the different in addressing things down to the grain scale. So, it’s really transformed the community."