The exponential growth of computing power has promoted scientific computing into a novel research tool and the method of choice to attack complex problems in physics, i.e. problems involving systems consisting of many bodies and/or having many degrees of freedom which are not easily amenable to standard experimental or theoretical investigations. Numerical modelling and simulations are heuristic tools making it possible to view new and previously inaccessible domains in science and to build up intuition on the new phenomenology. The goal of this process is to translate new-found intuition into better algorithms and new analytical results.

Project 141035 is built around the Scientific Computing Laboratory (best ranked EU centre of excellence in the region, under FP6 project CX-CMCS) and its state of the art computing, communication, and storage facilities. The purpose of the project is to harness these resources to gain key insight into the following research topics:

• Efficient calculation of path integrals
• Modeling and numerical simulations of granular systems
• Investigation of strongly correlated quantum systems
• Modeling of transport processes in the Earth-atmosphere system

Apart from the aforementioned research topics, we plan to continue ongoing research on related problems including modeling of gravitational accretion and the study of dynamics on scale-free networks.