How materials fracture is one of the most fundamental problems in materials science and engineering. Typically, the stress fields near the crack tip are highly nonlinear, and stress-field decay far from the tip is very slow, making fracture a difficult problem. Progress in large-scale scientific computing during the last decade has helped researchers successfully study dynamic fracture.

Priya Vashishta, Aiichiro Nakano, "Guest Editors' Introduction: Dynamic Fracture Analysis", Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 1, no. , pp. 20-23, September/October 1999, doi:10.1109/MCISE.1999.790583