Acquisition of a High Performance Computer for Solid Earth Geophysicis at Caltech

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

9910387 Gurnis This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a parallel processing compute server for basic solid Earth geophysical research within Caltech's Seismological Laboratory. The exact computer and configuration will be determined after considerable study of state-of-the-art scientific computers which are on the market during the first half of calendar year 2000. The machine will probably be comparable to a ten (10) processor SGI Origin 2000 with eight (8) Gigabytes of main memory with R12000 processors. The machine will be used by a large group of faculty (including, but not limited to, Professors M. Gurnis, R. Clayton, D. Helmberger, and M. Simons), postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students actively engaged in processing massive data sets, modeling physical processes, and developing new computational algorithms. Research will span seismology, geodynamics, and geodesy. Studies within these areas of geophysics are rapidly advancing in step with advances in the performance of departmental-scale, parallel-processing compute servers. Some typical computational projects which will be allowed by this facility will include processing interferometric radar data to observe crustal deformation, modeling slow crustal creep and intense ground shaking following earthquakes, processing seismic reflection data from oceanographic cruises, processing global tomographic images of the whole Earth, and modeling thermal convection within a spherical shell. ***