Our research group is part of the Molecular
Education and Research Consortium in computational chemistRY (MERCURY). The
consortium was formed in 2000 and consists of George Shields (Hamilton College),
Mar
ia Gomez (Mount
Holyoke College),
Carol Parish (University of Richmond) and Marc Zimmer (Connecticut College).
Our objective upon forming the MERCURY consortium was to help our undergraduate
research programs to flourish.
We have recieved funding from the National
Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation program to purchase computing
with which to support our research programs. MERCURY faculty and students have
regular and frequent interactions as we all perform calculations on two shared
supercomputers located at Hamilton
College: a 32-processor
and an 8-processor SGI Origin 300 that were purchased with NSF-MRI funds. This
grant has also allowed us to hire a system administrator, Steve Young, who is
located at Hamilton
College and who provides
considerable and valuable support to MERCURY faculty and students and allows us
to make maximum use of our computing resources. He is currently building a
32-processor Beowulf Cluster for the consortium.
For more information please visit the
consortium home page at mars.chem.hamilton.edu
HWS Press Release
on the MERCURY consortium