GEOWULF: An Inference Engine for Complex Earth Systems

The project is to build a Beowulf' cluster as a platform for solving complex data inference problems in the Earth sciences, and in particular the fields of thermochronology, seismology, crustal and mantle dynamics, and landform evolution. A Beowulf cluster is a network-linked set of commonly available off-the-shelf' PC-computers configured to give unprecedented performance/cost ratio. Projects using the Beowulf facility will combine state-of-the-art computational techniques recently developed at ANU, and high quality data sets collected over the past decade to address fundamental questions in the Geosciences.