Computer Facilities

The Chemistry Department operates an open computer lab with PC's, Macintosh computers, and SGI workstations. There is also a classroom with 18 iMac G4 computers and 45 iBook G3 computers for use in a mobile classroom environment.

Central computing in the Chemistry Department is primarily UNIX-based and consists of an SGI Origin 200 server with four R10000 processors and a grid (using Platform LSF) of dual G4 and G5 Macintosh computers that also serve as administrative assistant workstations located in various offices in the Chemistry Building.

The 18 iMac G4 lab computers are also interconnected using Apple Computer's Xgrid software.

Presently available software include Gaussian 03, Spartan, GAMESS, Cerius 2, Insight II, MOLPRO, MOLCAS.

Within individual research groups there are the usual personal computers for word processing, chemical structure drawing, and network access to chemical databases such as SciFinder,
the Cambridge Structural Database, and the Protein Databank.

In addition, numerous modern workstations (Linux, Mac OS X, SGI-IRIX) are used in research groups for NMR processing, molecular modeling, statistical mechanics computer simulation, and electronic structure determination.

Research groups in the Department are extensively networked and the Department is connected to the Internet through the University fiber-optic backbone at 100 Mb/s.

The entire Chemistry Building is also part of the campus-wide 802.11b wireless network (map of the campus wireless network).

Dr. Terry Gray serves as the full-time Computer Support Scientist in the Chemistry Department.