The Virtual Laboratory for Earth and Planetary Materials, VLab,
was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004 at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University
of Minnesota. Today, it is supported by the Department of Energy and Columbia University and is hosted by XSEDE's
JetStream system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). VLab is a cyberinfrastructure consisting of a
fully integrated Web portal, web services, and databases for ab initio calculations of planetary materials.
Affiliated scientists are interested in different aspects and properties of these
materials for modeling the structure of and physical and chemical processes in planetary interiors and surfaces.
VLab aims to accelerate modeling of planets by
-
addressing materials properties important to planetary sciences
- developing or improving methods to compute such properties
- facilitating the use of ab initio
simulation methods by creating friendly Web interfaces to facilitate and automate time-consuming human tasks
