News
Triton's subsurface ocean
September, 2012
Here's another article in astrobilogy magazine discussing the implications of Jodi Gaeman's research on a possible subsurface ocean in Triton on extraterrestrial life.
The outermost ocean in our solar system
May, 2012
A recent article in Icarus, led by former graduate student Jodi Gaeman suggests the presence of an ocean under the icy shell of Neptune's moon, Triton. If present, this ocean will be the outermost known ocean in our solar system. At an average temperature of -97° C, this ammonia-rich ocean was sustained over 4.5 billion years by tidal blanketing and readiogenic heating.
Read more about this research in this New Scientist article.
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Facilities
Most of our numerical work is done on a 4 node, 32 processor SGI Altix 1300 cluster, Stokeslet, housed in the Research Data Center, maintained by the Office of Information Technology at the University of Maryland. Stokeslet employs two parallel network interfaces. Routine cluster maintenance operations are performed over a network of gigabit Ethernet, while MPI directives are executed over a faster network of Infiniband cables. It is equipped with the latest fortran and C compilers, the intel math kernel library,and a customized version MPI for the infiniband network. In addition, parallel computing software such as PETSC and deal.II are also installed.
Visualization of the numerical model output is carried out in two 24 core, 64 GB visualization workstations. In addition to 24 CPU cores, each workstation is also equipped with 96 GPU cores and 1 GB GPU memory. Besides the cluster, a network of 5 dual processor Linux workstations, equipped with visualization software paraview, MATLAB, and Scilab is used for postprocessing and visualization.