The Earth Science Department has an extensive computing facility established with funds from the National Science Foundation, Sun Microsystems, and the petroleum industry. The Center for Computational Geophysics has two large SMP computers (a 20 processor/20 Gbyte memory Sun ES6500 and an 8 processor/32Gbyte memory SUN V880) for high performance computing. The computing network also has 50 Sun Sparc and Ultrasparc workstations, Windows workstations, and two Sun ES450 servers. Landmark^TM seismic software packages are used for seismic reflection data processing research; the Landmark suite is used for seismic interpretation. We are part of a Rice consortium operating a 500 node parallel Cray x01Super computer.

The department has several computer labs equipped with SUN, Mac and Windows workstations, color and black-and-white laser, inkjet, and thermal printers; two 54-inch color plotters, and a 24 inch black-and-white plotter. The plotters also function as a cost center allowing other departments to use our facilities for a fee. All workstations have access to Landmark^TM, as well as more than 200 other packages including mapping, seismic, and math software. Seismic stratigraphic and seismic interpretation workstations are also available.

The Keith-Wiess Geological Laboratories has fiber optics Ethernet connecting the main computing network to a large network of Macintosh and PC computers. Most graduate students have either a SUN, PC, or Mac on their desks. We have image-processing and graphics manipulation software and hardware for preparing presentations.

 Faculty in the Department of Earth Science and CCG collaborated with more than 30 researchers at Rice in the acquisition of a new Cray XD1 supercomputer cluster, supported in part by a Major Research Infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation (Julia Morgan was one of 5 co-PIs on the award), Rice University, and partnerships with AMD and Cray.  This facility is maintained by CITI  as part of the Shared Research Computing, and used for computational research in engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences.  Additional details can be found at the Rice University Cray XD1 Research Cluster page.