The Global Ecology Lab (GEL) team was awarded computational time on the Bluecrab High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The Bluecrab HPC cluster is a shared computing facility, jointly managed by John Hopkins University and the University of Maryland College Park, and offers 6 million hours of compute time to UMD, spread over 19,000 CPU cores. It also provides high-speed access to nearly 20 TB of storage.
The GEL team will use this new resource to advance a project led by Dr. George Hurtt to perform high-resolution carbon modeling at regional-global scales by running the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model at policy relevant scales. The research will focus on the structure, function and dynamics of ecological systems, and their interactions in the Earth system. To do this, the team will combine high-resolution satellite Lidar data along with a sophisticated partial differential equation based model of tree growth and disturbance to predict biomass accumulation over time.
For more information on the Bluecrab HPC cluster, see here: https://www.glue.umd.edu/hpcc/bluecrab.html
