Foreword
The human desire to understand things is insatiable and perpetually drives the advance of society, industry, and our quality of living. Scientific inquiry and research are at the core of this desire to understand, and, over the years, scientists have developed a number of formal means of doing that research. The third means of scientific research, developed in the past 100 years after theory and experimentation, is modeling and simulation. The sharpest tool invented thus far for modeling and simulation has been the computer. It is fascinating to observe that, within the short span of a few decades, humans have developed dramatically larger and larger scale computing systems, increasingly based on massive replication of commodity elements to model and simulate complex phenomena in increasing details, thus delivering greater insights. At this juncture in computing, it looks as if we have managed to turn everything physical into its virtual equivalent, letting a virtual world precede the physical one it reflects so that we can predict what is going to happen before it happens. Better yet, we want to use modeling and simulation to tell us how to change what is going to happen. The thought is almost scary as we are not supposed to do God’s work.
We all know the early studies of ballistic trajectories and code breaking, which stimulated the development of the first computers. From those beginnings, all kinds of physical objects and natural phenomena have been captured and reflected ...
