The National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program has awarded Hamilton College $780,220 to buy a supercomputer for the project titled
"Acquisition of High Performance Computers for the Northeastern Undergraduate Research Chemistry Consortium."
The consortium consists of faculty at Colgate, Connecticut College, Hobart & William Smith, Holy Cross, St. Lawrence, Vassar, and Hamilton, all of whom have undergraduate research programs in computational chemistry. The consortium colleges are providing $215,000 in matching funds for local graphics. These workstations will be used to connect over the internet to run their computations on the supercomputer which will be located at Hamilton College, and to visualize the results of their computations.
Hamilton College will provide $400,000 in matching funds toward the purchase of the supercomputer. Hamilton Chemistry Professor George Shields, the principal investigator on the grant, will use part of the NSF money to hire a system administrator and research support technician, who will maintain the equipment, ensure equal access for all seven investigators, troubleshoot software problems for all investigators, and help with an annual conference. Dreyfus Postdoctoral Fellow Steven Feldgus will assist in the implementation of this grant proposal and will become the 8th member of the Consortium when he takes a job at a liberal arts college in the fall of 2002.
