This grant supports acquisition of new computational equipment to support research and research training in seismology, geodynamics and rock mechanics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Three PIs and their 34 graduate students will benefit from the planned acquisition of a 4 node, 16 CPU per node Linux-OS cluster each with 256 GB RAM and a 36 TB RAID mass store system. The compute cluster will support computational intensive analysis of seismic observations to constrain the geodynamics of the lithosphere and upper mantle through observations of shear wave splitting, particularly in extensional settings, finite element forward modeling of fracture development within reservoir rocks, and modeling investigations of rock mechanical implications of liquefied CO2 subsurface injections, to name a few. Students trained will be well positioned for future careers in academia as well as the extractive industries.
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. We have purchased a Dell C6220 Linux server with 4 nodes, 1 TB RAM, and about 30 TB of RAID disk storage space. Intellectual Metir: The three investigators are currently supervising 12 PhD candidates, 22 MS candidates, and five undergraduate lab assistants. They are involved in six externally-funded active projects with a total budget of $2.07 million. All the investigators and their students are computational geophysicists and thus Linux servers are the most critical facilities to ensure the success of their current and future projects, and the timely completion of student dissertations. Prior to the upgrading, computing facilities in both groups were out of dated and were severely inadequate in terms of the number of processors, amount of RAM. Broader Impacts: Besides their very critical impacts on the numerous research projects, the upgraded computing facilities are playing a key role in promoting teaching of several computingintensive courses, and training of graduate and undergraduate students. The three investigators routinely teach the following computing-intensive courses, in addition to other courses: Computational Geophysics (Gao); Advanced Geophysical Data Processing (Gao); Propagation of Elastic Waves (Liu); Mechanical Earth Modeling (Eckert); and Geodynamics (Eckert). The total annual enrollment of the courses is over 150. If a node in the proposed Dell server is not used at any time, it will temporarily become part of the campus-wide computing network for general use by students and faculty in other academic units at Missouri S&T. This arrangement further broadens the impacts of the proposed instruments. The 34 graduate students supervised by the PIs are originally from 10 countries including several African countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, and Libya. The proposed equipment increases the probability for the students to become successful geophysicists, which in turn will help improve the diversity of the geoscientific workforce.
