Acquisition of a New Scientific Computer

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Partial support is provided for the acquisition of a scientific computing system for the Wake Forest University Physics and Chemistry departments. The primary use of this facility would be to support the departments' research in theoretical condensed matter physics, quantum chemistry, and quantum field theory in curved space. At present these departments operate a system consisting of two Convex C-120 vectorizing minisupercomputers. The proposed new system will replace these obsolete computers with a cluster of the latest RISC superscalar processors. The problems to be studied include: 1) density functional investigation of surface reconstruction and of electron tunneling; 2) nonlinear effects in the dynamics of structural phase transitions; 3) point defect structures in solids; 4) effects of quantum fields on black hole spacetimes; and 5) quantum chemical investigation of atmospheric molecular species. The computer configuration to be purchased is a cluster of Hewlett-Packard workstations, configured into a Meta-system by Convex. The system consists of the following hardware: four HP 9000/735 computational nodes each with 128 Megabytes of memory and a 1 Gigabyte internal disk; 20 Gigabyte of external disk storage; an additional HP 9000/735 with smaller memory and disk for system administration. Convex packages the HP workstations into a single unit and provides software that unifies the system operation and includes a library of highly optimized scientific subroutines.