As part of the Undergraduate Chemistry Supercomputer Research Consortium project, funded by the National Science Foundation, the chemistry department at Hamilton college has acquired a supercomputer for student and faculty research. The supercomputer is an SGI Origin 300 with 32 processors, 32 gigabytes of memory and nearly a terabyte of disk space.
Jenn Sturm, system administrator and research support specialist for the consortium, says, "The acquisition of the supercomputer gives the investigators in the consortium access to a high-performance, massively parallel computer on which to perform computer-intensive research." She explains that the capability of this computer exceeds resources typically available to chemistry investigators at undergraduate institutions. Sturm is also assembling a Linux Beowulf cluster, which uses low-cost hardware and distributed computing technology to obtain supercomputer performance.
Posted January 24, 2002
