This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Granted funds will support upgrade of compute facilities in the Department of Geology at the University of California at Davis. A U.S. assembled and tested, 120 CPU compute cluster with 240 GB of RAM will be acquired. The computational facility will support a range of numerically intensive geodynamics research including modeling studies of 3-D deformation field in the Southern Alaska subduction zone, ridge subduction, plume-subduction interaction, oceanic plateau deformation and crustal-fragment accretion during subduction and mantle mixing. The cluster will also support development of new algorithms for control of 3-D immersive virtual reality environments. Students will be trained in state-of-the-art parallel code development and testing.
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