MONMOUTH, Ill. — The trusty old computer has certainly made our lives easier. Imagine how much easier life would be with 100 of them.
Chris Fasano, Monmouth College’s Martha S. Pattee Professor of Science, doesn’t have to imagine – he knows.
“The Monmouth College physics department has now passed 100 processors running continuously on our parallel computer,” he said. “Over the past three years, I’ve been building a grid computer to do high-performance computing. It is quite unusual to find such a computer at a college like ours.”
The computer now consists of 101 Sun UltraSparc II processors, allowing the physics department to do large scientific computations by dividing the problem in pieces that each processor can work on.
“We have used this for an introduction to parallel computing in my computational physics class and we are using it for a number of projects with students, including our protein folding project,” said Fasano, who chairs the physics department. He is also using it to collaborate on nuclear physics projects with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Barcelona and “to try to understand and model severe storms.”
In other department news, Fasano and faculty colleague Anota Ijaduola attended the 1st Midwest Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at the University of Michigan last month, accompanied by senior Jamie Walker of Brimfield and freshmen Lizzie McIntyre of Pekin and MacKenzie Warren of Portland, Ore.
The conference, which was “excellent,” according to Fasano, gave participants an opportunity to look into graduate school and career opportunities, explore resources for women physicists and hear about current research. Speakers included University of Michigan president Mary Sue Colman, as well as female faculty members from Michigan, Northwestern, MIT, the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago.
All three MC students are involved in their own research projects. Walker, who plans to attend graduate school this fall and study engineering, is working on her senior project on the effects of water flow on earthen structures. Warren’s research involves magnetars, which are “exotic neutron stars with strong magnetic fields,” according to Fasano, and McIntyre’s project involves the use of superconductors.
