Nikos Fytas and Martin Weigel have just been awarded a Research Grant of the Royal society for the simulation of disordered systems with the help of accelerator devices such as graphics processing units. The grant in the value of around £15k will allow them to purchase a GPU cluster machine, intended for studying using combinatorial ground states calculations as well as generalized ensemble Monte Carlo simulations to study the random-field Ising model and spin-glass systems such as the Edwards-Anderson model. In preliminary studies, speed-ups of simulation codes for such systems of the order of several hundred times have been observed. The research is hoped to help settle a number of long-standing questions around the critical behavior of such systems and the nature of the respective low-temperature phases.
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