The California Institute of Technology will host an "Earthquakes 101" workshop today as part of the dedication of Caltech's new Dell-powered Earthquake Media Center. The media center, housed in Caltech's Geosciences Computational Facility, uses some of the latest technology to translate complex earthquake data into 2-D graphics -- an advance that will help the media report earthquake news in a timely, easy-to-understand manner. "Seismological technology has vastly improved to the point that within less than an hour we can now create a 2-D animation of seismic waves radiating out from the epicenter on a topographical map," said Dr. Jeroen Tromp, director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory and McMillan Professor of Geophysics. "We call these animations 'ShakeMovies' and they will be one of the new offerings that the lab is introducing to the media at this event." In a video statement, Dell Chairman Michael Dell will explain how simulations and findings enabled by the facility's 1,024-node Dell supercomputing cluster are fed into two Dell Precision workstations, and then projected onto a custom visualization wall in the media center. "We are excited to see the positive impact this high-performance cluster and new media center will have on helping the public better understand and visualize the impact of earthquakes," Mr. Dell says. Speakers from Caltech and the USGS will also discuss what might happen to Los Angeles' tall buildings in a major quake, real-time Earth science, and how Caltech can provide the media with information and graphics immediately after a quake. The Geosciences Computational Facility's supercomputing cluster is made up of 1,024 Dell PowerEdge dual-processor servers. Dell pre-assembled the cluster for easy implementation, and Dell Services worked on campus to complete the installation.