The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to try.
the first machine went to Los Alamos
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/these...
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/human-computers-lo...
"The staff in the T-5 group included recruited women who had degrees in mathematics or physics, as well as, wives of scientists and other workers at Los Alamos. According to Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project, some of the human computers were Mary Frankel, Josephine Elliot, Beatrice “Bea” Langer, Augusta “Mici” Teller, Jean Bacher, and Kay Manley. While some of the computers worked full time, others, especially those who had young children, only worked part time.
General Leslie R. Groves, the Director of the Manhattan Project, pressured the wives of Los Alamos to work because he felt that it was a waste of resources to accommodate civilians. As told by Kay Manley, the wife of Los Alamos physicist John Manley, the recruitment of wives can also be traced to a desire to limit the housing of “any more people than was absolutely necessary.” This reason makes sense given the secretive nature of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. SEDs, a group of drafted men who were to serve domestically using their scientific and engineering backgrounds, also worked in the T division."
These are incredibly expensive even on today’s hardware. If you look through some of the unclassified ASCI reports from the early 2000s, 3D calculations of this equation set were implied to be leadership-class computations. At the time of the Cray, it must’ve been coarse-grid 1D as the standard, with 2D as the dream.
Oh cool they got CrayOS working.
But still 1MB RAM, I remember getting the slow RAM 512KB update for my Amiga 500 in the early 90s.
in europe
( There was a seperate dedicated weather computer, this one was used for 'other' jobs like speculative weather modelling, monster group algebraic fun, et al.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber
The UK was the first customer:
In 1980, the successor to the Cyber 203, the Cyber 205 was announced. The UK Meteorological Office at Bracknell, England was the first customer and they received their Cyber 205 in 1981.If you really want a challenge, do it using pen, paper and a slide rule, like in the old days[1]. Just make sure to apply appropriate smoothing of the input data first[2].
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-world-war-i-chang...
I wish I had access to the code I wrote back then - what took minutes or hours on the Cray could probably run in seconds on a RPi now…