Physicist Warren Pickett now has a "computer farm." Consisting of a master workstation and 40 rack-mounted 700 MHz nodes for other computers (shown in the background), the "farm" is located next to Pickett’s office in the Physics/Geology Building.

Its purchase, through the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, will produce results that support the the campus’s Computational Sciences Initiative. Pickett is a material theorist and a computational physicist who recently completed a three-year term as a councilor for the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society.

According to Pickett, the computer system will be used by students, postdoctoral researchers, other faculty members and outside collaborators, all of whom need high-end computers for their computations.

More specifically, the computers will be used to carry out numerical simulations of the electronic and magnetic behavior of complex solids and nanophase materials.