HPCwire: Virginia Tech Geophysicists Get New Dell Cluster

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October 26, 2007

Virginia Tech Geophysicists Get New Dell Cluster

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BLACKSBURG, Va., Oct. 24 -- A new computing cluster will allow Virginia Tech's geoscientists to see the earth's mantle in greater detail than ever before and answer such questions as, "Just how big is the plume from the earth's core that fuels Hawaiian volcanoes?"

Scott King, professor of geophysics, and Ying Zhou, assistant professor of geophysics, have built a new computational cluster that is 1,000 times more powerful than a typical home PC, said Kevin Shinpaugh, director of research and cluster computing at Virginia Tech.

The system consists of 96 Dell 1950 servers; each node has two Intel Clovertown (quad-core) processors and includes 12 GB of RAM. The total system has 768 cores, Shinpaugh said. The system interconnect is double-data-rate (DDR) InfiniBand with a 144 port DDR QLogic switch.

The High-Performance Earth Simulation System (HESS) has eight times the capacity of the 96-processor cluster the researchers are presently working with, King said.

"The interior of the earth is an inaccessible place and we have to study it using indirect observations and numerical models," said King. "With the new cluster, we will be able to do jobs eight-times faster. Things that took two weeks will take two days. More significantly, we will be able to do bigger jobs - with more information. We can put detail and physics into a model that we couldn't before," he said.

More information on King's research may be found online at www.geos.vt.edu/people/sking07/.

For example, Zhou's research depends upon information from seismic tomography, which uses the energy of earthquake waves to create three-dimensional images of the Earth's interior from 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) down to the surface. "We have not been able to make use of all the information that was collected because of limited computing capacity," she said.

The speed of the waves is altered by the temperature structure in the mantle, but models have had to discard details of velocity (temperature) variations. "Previous models are not able to distinguish between small scale hot materials and large scale anomalies accurately," Zhou said. Since waves travel more slowly through a heated rock, "If in the previous mantle models, you see a 2000 kilometer diameter rock hotter than surrounding rocks, the real size of that hot stuff is probably only 200 km in diameter. The previous models can only 'see' large scale anomalies," she said. "Also, the mantel is moving because some parts are hotter than other parts; so seismic velocities are different.

Zhou is trying to understand seismic velocity structure, temperature structure, and how material moves in the mantel. "With the new cluster, I hope to be able to translate seismic data into velocity and temperature structures in the crust and mantle, and probably the inner core. We will be able to image the earth's interior at high resolution - and learn the dynamic processes in the Earth," she said.

More information on Zhou's research may be found online at www.geos.vt.edu/people/yingz/.

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