George Matthews - US grants

The Convex C1 is a very fast state-of-the-art "mini-super computer" that utilizes a pipeline vector processor and a memory cache to achieve a high level of computational throughput. The C1 will allow the students and faculty to pursue a wider range of problems using the best of current methods and to complete the studies at a reasonable rate. This award from the Division of Materials Research and the Chemistry Shared Instrumentation Program will help the Departments of Chemistry and Physics of Wake Forest University purchase an upgrade of their Convex C1-XP computer. This upgrade will be used to study problems in the following areas: 1. Nonlinear condensed matter systems 2. Electronic structure calculations for solids and surfaces 3. Point defect structures 4. Parity violation and chirality in atoms and molecules 5. Deterministic and stochastic phenomena in non-equilibrium chemical systems. 6. Quantum chemical studies of short-lived and weakly bound molecular species.

Partial support is provided for the acquisition of a scientific computing system for the Wake Forest University Physics and Chemistry departments. The primary use of this facility would be to support the departments' research in theoretical condensed matter physics, quantum chemistry, and quantum field theory in curved space. At present these departments operate a system consisting of two Convex C-120 vectorizing minisupercomputers. The proposed new system will replace these obsolete computers with a cluster of the latest RISC superscalar processors. The problems to be studied include: 1) density functional investigation of surface reconstruction and of electron tunneling; 2) nonlinear effects in the dynamics of structural phase transitions; 3) point defect structures in solids; 4) effects of quantum fields on black hole spacetimes; and 5) quantum chemical investigation of atmospheric molecular species. The computer configuration to be purchased is a cluster of Hewlett-Packard workstations, configured into a Meta-system by Convex. The system consists of the following hardware: four HP 9000/735 computational nodes each with 128 Megabytes of memory and a 1 Gigabyte internal disk; 20 Gigabyte of external disk storage; an additional HP 9000/735 with smaller memory and disk for system administration. Convex packages the HP workstations into a single unit and provides software that unifies the system operation and includes a library of highly optimized scientific subroutines.

9510390 Williams The 13th International Conference on Defects in Insulating Materials will be held July 15-16, 1996 at Wake Forest University. The Conference will focus on wide-gap materials and their defects in bulk and interface regions. A wide range of scientific and technological topics will be covered. The scientific sessions will feature theoretical (computational) methods and experimental techniques for understanding defect physics. Ferroelectric memory materials, gate insulators, blue diode laser materials, and fiber optics are some of the technological problems to be discussed. %%% The 13th International Conference on Defects in Insulating Materials will be held July 15-16, 1996 at Wake Forest University. The Conference will focus on wide-gap materials and their defects in bulk and interface regions. A wide range of scientific and technological topics will be covered. The scientific sessions will feature theoretical (computational) methods and experimental techniques for understanding defect physics. Ferroelectric memory materials, gate insulators, blue diode laser materials, and fiber optics are some of the technological problems to be discussed. ***