Upgrading of Geophysics Communal Computer Laboratory

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

0236455 Brodsky Funds from this grant will support an upgrade to a communal geophysics computer facility in the Department of Earth & Space Sciences at UCLA. The current computing facility is based on an aging (vintage 1997) Solaris environment consisting of Sun Ultra and SPARC workstations. A new multi-CPU SunBlade server, five SunBlade workstations and five PC workstations running Linux will augment this network and will serve eleven faculty members and their students. An additional 2 TB RAID system will add significant additional storage capacity for analysis of massive seismic data holdings. The University will provide funding for both a portion of the new equipment and also for an upgrade of the Ethernet connection in the Geology building to 1 Gbit capacity. A portion of this grant will also provide limited support for the salary of a computer systems administrator during the installation phase. This upgraded facility will serve not only the startup needs of the lead PI, Emily Brodsky, for her theoretical models of explosive eruption dynamics, but also the needs of many other active faculty members including John Vidale, David Jackson, Heidi Houston , Paul Davis and John Aurnou, to name a few. The increased computational speed and storage capacity of this compute facility will foster leading research in earthquake seismology, seismic tomography and geodynamics. The proposal's broader impacts include both infrastructure development for multiple researchers and their students and the promotion of societally relevant earthquake mitigation efforts. ***