Publication

Systems Engineering (SE)
2017

ENDGAME SIMULATION USING AN ALL-INCLUSIVE, ULTRA-FAST VULNERABILITY AND LETHALITY CODE

by Alexander Bernardo; Patrick Buckley; Matt Perini

Abstract

An endgame, vulnerability/lethality code, TurboPK was developed to take advantage of parallel processing of multi-core, modern-day desktop and laptop computers. TurboPK is used to simulate and analyze weapon-related kinetic energy and blast effects of military vehicles. It implements Department of Defense (DoD)-approved algorithms and is compatible with the DoD design trade-off process. Its speed advantage is commensurate with the increase in number of cores used. A quad-core processor results in run times that are four times faster than using a single core. The heart of endgame analysis calculates geometric intersections of projectiles or fragments with vehicle components using ray-tracing algorithms. For example, literally thousands of rays are used to accurately model the fragment ejecta from a warhead in a burst point analysis. Algorithms originally written for a single processor have been rewritten to exploit an open-source, parallel process ray tracer called Embree, provided by Intel Corporation.