Hamilton College is housing a new research consortium for undergraduate chemistry students, reports MSNBC.com. Led by Hamilton Professor of Chemistry George Shields, the Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Conceptual Chemistry, or MERCURY, program enables undergraduates from Hamilton and six other liberal arts institutions access to a SGI Origin 300, 32-processor server, for chemistry research.
Endowed by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program, the server will be used as the foundation for a supercomputing consortium devoted to conceptual chemistry. Hamilton Professor of Chemistry and MERCURY director Shields comments, "We are delighted to have these high performance servers to run our applications." He continues, "[We] are using these servers to run simulations in quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics."
In addition to the new SGI system, Hamilton will host MERCURY's first-ever national conference, to be held from July 21-23. The event will feature talks by eight speakers, including SGI principal scientist Roberto Gomperts. Shields commented, "We are very excited about our first annual national conference devoted to undergraduate chemistry...we are thrilled that Roberto Gomperts will share his expertise."
