In 1944 Los Alamos was focused on fluids and heat transfer, the same types of problems worked by Humble Oil and David Young in the following years. Stan Frankel became the first patient infected with "the computer disease" at Los Alamos, a diagnosis created specifically for Frankel by Richard Feynman. The first photo of this post shows the Los Alamos technical area and Building E, housing both the hand calculators of GroupT-5 and the IBM punched card machines of Group T-6. [1][2]
Whether simulating the conditions in a nuclear reactor, or a subsurface reservoir, or a reentry heat shield, fluids and heat meant spatial fields, flow, and harmonic boundary value problems. In practice, with a computer, this meant matrix and vector linear algebra for large systems of equations, and the period around 1950 marked the dawn of modern linear algebra. There was a direct connection between the fluid dynamics simulations at Los Alamos and at Humble, and the initial breakthroughs happened on essentially the same punched card machines. A span of ten years passed, from 1944 to 1954, while the computing hardware remained within the IBM CPC lineage, and this is the historical legacy that Al Matsen brought from Humble to Welch Hall in 1958.
Young and Frankel published the independently created iterative SOR Successive Over-Relaxation approach to harmonic boundary values problems in 1950. [3][4] Humble's Peaceman, Rachford, and Douglas followed soon after with the ADI Alternating Direction Implicit approach. [5] These methods were purely about using a mesh or grid of points to cover a space and calculating differences between the points, based on some given values on the boundary. The value at each mesh point was a variable, so for a 100 x 100 mesh there were 10E4 variables. A full matrix representation of the equations would have 10E8 elements, far too many for the memories or storage of the era, so sparse matrix representations and band matrix structure were essential concepts. Frankel had of course been deeply involved with the IBM CPC precursors at Los Alamos, and the ADI work at Humble was done on a CPC. Young was working at the Aberdeen Proving Ground at the time, a major CPC site, though it seems he was mostly working with the ORDVAC. For these machines, converting the linear algebra into its most minimalistic forms was essential.
At Aberdeen in the early fifites, David Young was working with his first student, Charles Warlick. After reentry vehicle work at TRW, Young moved to UT Austin in 1958 to help found the Computation Center, the same year that Humble donated its IBM CPC to Al Matsen and the chemistry department in Welch Hall. In 1965, Young brought Warlick to UT to head the Computation Center. There's another connection in discussion from Peaceman of the work at Humble in Houston around 1953.
We had access in those days to several eminent consultants. One of them was John von Neumann, and he visited us a couple of times. He was very interested in the work we were doing, but when we asked him how to go about solving two-dimensional problems of this sort, he had no more to offer than the so-called extrapolated Liebman method, now known as successive overrelaxation, or SOR. We already knew about that method. [6]
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| 1944 Los Alamos precursors of the 1949 IBM CPC |
[1] Excellent history for Stan Frankel. Be sure to read about his creation of the LGP-30, of Story of Mel fame, about mid way down the page. Also an excellent website for seventies HP computers.
[2] B. J. Archer, "The Los Alamos Computing Facility During the Manhattan Project," Nuclear Technology 207, no. sup1 (2021).
[3] David M. Young Jr., "Iterative Methods for Solving Partial Difference Equations of Elliptic Type" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1950).
[4] Stanley P. Frankel, "Convergence Rates of Iterative Treatments of Partial Differential Equations," Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation 4, no. 30 (1950): 65–75.
[5] D. W. Peaceman and H. H. Rachford Jr., "The Numerical Solution of Parabolic and Elliptic Differential Equations," Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 3, no. 1 (1955): 28–41.
[6] Peaceman, Donald W. 1990. "A Personal Retrospection of Reservoir Simulation." In A History of Scientific Computing, edited by Stephen G. Nash, 106–29. New York: ACM Press / Addison-Wesley.
Earlier posts on related topics
https://decwarorg.blogspot.com/2026/05/oldest-computer-on-campus-but-not-first.html
https://decwarorg.blogspot.com/2026/06/cdc-at-ut-austin-and-ibm-at-exxon.html
https://decwarorg.blogspot.com/2026/05/welch-hall-1958-benedict-hall-1960.html
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