The Center for Computational Geophysics was established in 1998 to promote cross-disciplinary studies of the Earth requiring large computational resources. Comprised of 11 faculty members and research associates from the Earth Science, Computational & Applied Mathematics, and Electrical & Computer Engineering Departments, the Center has research areas in petroleum, environmental, and academic seismology, lithosphere and whole mantle geodynamics, and fault mechanics.

The Center is supported by Rice University, and has research and equipment funding from NSF, DOE, SUN Microsystems, and two industrially sponsored consortia.

The Center received a Major Research Infrastructure award from the NSF Earth Sciences Facilities and Instrumentation Program for high performance SMP computers. Matching funds for the SMP machine were provided by SUN Microsystems and Rice. We now have a 20 processor/20 Gbyte memory SUN ES6500 with a 1 Tbyte RAID system, and an 8 processor/ 32Gbyte SUN V880 with 1 Tbyte RAID system.

We offer a cross-disciplinary professional M.S. and Ph.D. program through the Computational Science and Engineering Degree Program through Computational Science and Engineering Degree Program, allowing students in the three departments the opportunity to create a flexible research and course program.