Upgrading of Linux Computing Facility for Research in Climate-Change, Glacier Dynamics, and Fluid Flow

0447235

Anandakrishnan

This grant supports an upgrade to a current Sun Solaris OS-based computational facility shared by Sridhar Anandakrishnan, Richard Alley, Peter Flemings and their students in the Department of Geosciences at Penn Sate University. Specific equipment to be purchased includes 10 Dell workstations with dual 2.8 GHz CPUs, 3 Gb RAM and running Linux OS. Four of these workstations will be equipped with dual monitors for visualization. The workstations will replace existing Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 workstations with CPU clock speeds at 300 to 440 MHz. The new workstation seats will still take advantge an existing back office consisting of a Sun File server, multi-CPU application and compute servers and plotting equipment. In addition, the existing network switch at 100Mbit will be replaced with a fast Gbit switch. The upgraded computational facilities will be engaged in a variety of numerically intensive research efforts ranging from dynamical and seismic investigations of Antarctic continental glaciers to seismic investigations of the Antarctic crustal and upper mantle structure to studies of fluid flow and pressures within passive continental margin sedimentary basins.

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