Welcome to fats!
Fats
Fats is the Beowulf computer cluster of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (LDEO).
To find more about research projects developed on fats by Columbia professors, scientists, post-docs, and students, please visit fats' research page.
Fats' resources page describes the hardware and software capabilities of our cluster.
Interested in writting your own programs on fats? Please, visit fats' programming page, where you will find a number of helpful tools for programmers.
If you are a prospective or new user , or if you want to setup your own research web page, we also have useful information for you.
Why fats
Advanced scientific computation and simulation is an essential tool in much of science, and has become an equal partner with theory, experiment, and observation. The role of computing is particularly important for the Earth Sciences, where the temporal and spatial scales of interest far exceed what is feasible for direct experimentation. In addition, many of the fundamental observations of earth systems are, by necessity, proxy measurements that require theoretical models to link observations to processes and predictions.
LDEO has a long history of using advanced computation to understand complex processes in both fluid and solid Earth. It also has a long history of observing the Earth, and creating the data against which theories of how the Earth works must be tested. It is the interplay between modelers and observational Earth scientists that makes LDEO such a unique research environment.
To enable LDEO research with powerful yet affordable computational resources, on July 2001 Profs. Mark Cane and Marc Spiegelman wrote a Lamont Investment Fund Proposal requesting funds for a 64-processor Beowulf cluster, which eventually became fats.
The Beowulf cluster was installed on December 2001. It is named "fats", after Thomas "Fats" Waller , a tribute we pay to the creative and irrevent spirit of the hard working genius of stride piano . Fats has been operating 24/7 over 360 days per year ever since. Considerable expertise in Earth science modeling, parallel programming, and a number of sound scientific results have been obtained from fats. A partial account of these results was made on a 2003 report by Profs. Cane and Spiegelman.
Last updated on by Gus Correa.
