The VLab is a possible answer to the requests of experimental colleagues in
the mineral physics community, who wish to perform computational
experiments when laboratory experiments are impossible. However, its full
implementation and operation as a community facility, which is its
ultimate goal, will require substantial training and user support.
While the VLab is brought to operation, user support must be carried
out in a reduced scale through a pilot project, mainly to
get feedback from its users. We will train and enable students and/or
post-docs from two experimental groups, Prof.Alexandra Navrotsky
(UC-Davis) and Prof. Shun-ichiro Karato (Yale), to use the techniques and
apply them through the VLab. This is a very realistic goal. Several
computational mineral physicists today started as experimentalists.
(Wentzcovitch, Karki, Erlebacher, and Pierce)
