This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr. Alice Quillen (University of Rochester) will lead a theoretical study of the orbital dynamics of the early phases of planet formation. She will focus on the gravitational interactions of protoplanets and small bodies, and will relate dust production and morphology to processes such as planet growth, migration, scattering, and resonance crossing, and explore how these processes could be observed.
This study will increase the numbers and mass range of particles simulated, compared to previous efforts, and will consider collisional evolution, accretion, and gravitational interactions. This will require computer codes of increased capability, so this group will develop methods for performing parallel computations on graphics processing units. These units have several potential advantages, mainly that they are low-cost platforms combining many processors with fast and large on-device memory.
Dr. Quillen and her group will develop and run a yearly workshop on parallel computing with graphics cards for summer research students and faculty. Students will learn to write, test, and execute simple programs in the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) programming language. As in previous years, new workshops will host students and research faculty from multiple departments; this will provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, promote transference of ideas and algorithms across disciplines, and maximize student involvement and research productivity. There will also be other workshops of an introductory nature for students with limited programming experience.
