MRI: Acquisition of a High-Performance Parallel Computing Cluster for Astrophysics Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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Astronomers don't just use telescopes in their attempts to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Many problems require heavy analytic computation and the use of computer simulations to understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form, grow, evolve, and die. The simulations can include a huge number of objects, embedded in a complex environment of dust, gases, magnetic fields as well as the unknown dark matter, and follow these objects as they interact, coalesce, or disrupt. Today's computers have become massively parallel - that is to say that they have many "processing units" working in parallel to solve these highly complex problems. One noted and successful team at the University of California Santa Cruz proposes to acquire a new computer "cluster" to attack difficult unsolved problems in astrophysics. The Principal Investigator, Dr. Piero Madau, and his team will use their new computing power to try to answer many questions in astrophysics from the very early days of the universe up to the present time and beyond. This new computer cluster will consist of hundreds of multiple processors, both conventional computer processors as well as graphical processors. It will have one petabyte of disk storage capacity (that is one million gigabytes!). The acquisition of this important research tool is funded by NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences through the Major Research Instrumentation program.