Welcome
Welcome to the Web home of CITerra, a High Performance Computing cluster in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at Caltech. CITerra is a large network of ordinary computers that work together to solve challenging problems in the geosciences.
Several groups of researchers in GPS use the power of CITerra to examine natural phenomena, using numerical models of the physics underlying those phenomena. With the devotion of large cluster like CITerra to the computational geosciences at Caltech, professors, postdoctoral researchers, research staff, and students can routinely perform larger studies and gain greater scientific insight than they ever could before.
The numerical simulations performed on CITerra allow researchers to visualize phenomena that occur all the time in the natural world, but which are normally invisible to us. The scientists compare the results from these simulations to experimental measurements made in the real world, iteratively refining their models of the physical system under study and gaining a better and better understanding of it. Depending on the goals of a specific research project, CITerra users can take a step back to view dynamics of a whole planet or a planet’s atmosphere, or zoom in to study physical phenomena on a small spatial or temporal scale. In most cases, this work could not be advanced without CITerra.
CITerra was officially opened in November 2005. The cluster was upgraded in February 2007 and the new cluster placed at #29 on the April 2007 list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. To our knowledge, it is the most powerful supercomputer in the world run by a single academic department.
To learn more about CITerra, follow the links on the left side of this page under the Public Pages heading. Please note that some sections are password-protected for viewing only by the users of the cluster.
Thank you
The purchase and installation of CITerra were made possible in large part by generous gifts of money, hardware, and software from the National Science Foundation, Dell Inc., Myricom Inc. and the Intel Corporation. We thank them heartily for their support, and for the commitment they have demonstrated to advancing the computational geosciences at Caltech.
The design and construction of the facility that houses CITerra was supported by Caltech and by the GPS Division at Caltech. We thank these institutions and the visionary individuals within them who understood the importance of the science that could only be pursued by building this facility.
Finally, the cost of ongoing operations of the facility is largely paid from grants to individual faculty members in GPS. We are grateful for the financial support of research in GPS by a diverse set of public and private institutions.