Sometimes time is the best gift of all. Eighty-three million core-hours on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers will be accessible to a group of scientists led by UCLA in collaboration with the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, or CIG, based at UC Davis.

Project lead Jonathan Aurnou, a UCLA professor of planetary sciences and geophysics, and the multidisciplinary team will use the Mira supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory to simulate the origins and evolution of the Earth’s magnetic field at an unprecedented scale, using code developed and released by CIG.