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.

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