Early in my career I worked in a position where I modeled hydrodynamic and thermodynamic systems. The technique we used in that work was generally called finite-element modeling, where we broke each system down into a large number of cells, and used equations for each cell that described the liquid-flow (hydrodynamic) and/or heat-transfer (thermodynamic) in and out of each cell.
Many of the techniques we used back then (late 1970s) were very primitive, but the basic finite-element technique remains in place, and in use for modeling the largest system we deal with currently – Our Planet’s Biosphere.
My across-town neighbors (and others) recently won a major award for computer model-building, and described some breakthroughs they made in winning this prize.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-led effort that performed an unprecedented global climate model simulation on the world’s first exa-scale supercomputer has won the first-ever Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, ACM officials announced Thursday (Nov 16).