This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Granted funds will support acquisition of a cluster of NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1.44 GHz GPU computing nodes to augment an existing Linux CPU cluster at the University of Wyoming. Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are designed to provide high throughput on parallel computations using many-core chips for which the primary market has been the graphic intensive gaming industry. NVIDIA has recently released the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) framework GPU programming interface making it possible to develop parallel codes to run on GPUs at much higher price/performance than is possible on CPUs. The PIs will explore parallelism and scalability of scientific computing on heterogeneous clusters composed of hardware with very different processing capability, speed and throughput and develop a set of open-source, GPU-accelerated modeling and inversion codes for geoscience research and to teach General-Purpose computation on GPUs (GPGPU) to graduate students at Geology & Geophysics Department, Computer Science Department and Mathematics Department in University of Wyoming. The PIs will develop GPU codes for seismic wave propagation simulations and fullwave seismic tomography and fluid dynamics simulations for oil reservoir modeling, subsurface fluid flow and solute transport and mantle convection.
