MONMOUTH, Ill. — Monmouth College’s innovative physics department again received national notice thanks to an article that appeared in the Aug. 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Department chair Chris Fasano was quoted extensively in a story titled “Your College Gets a Supercomputer! And Yours, and Yours!” The mention of Monmouth’s physics success comes on the heels of the college being one of just 29 throughout the nation to receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct nuclear energy research.

The article in The Chronicle discusses how supercomputers, once a multimillion-dollar investment that was affordable only for elite universities and government labs, have now become common. The work Fasano has done at Monmouth was used as a shining example.

The article stated, “Consider the new supercomputer that Monmouth College … cobbled together from dozens of old high-end computers bought on eBay for about $200 each. It was assembled by Christopher G. Fasano, a professor of physics, who figures the machines retailed for $30,000 apiece a few years ago, when they were new. He uses the homemade device for research on protein folding, in hopes that his simulations of the behavior of living cells can one day help medical researchers cure diseases.”

Specifically, Fasano developed the computer with more than 100 Sun UltraSparc II processors. He explained that MC’s type of parallel computer is becoming the norm in the world of physics, replacing the previous standard of having one extremely fast processor. The parallel computer tackles large scientific computations by dividing the problem into separate pieces that each processor can work on.

Earlier this year, one of Fasano’s research opportunity proposals was fully funded through a TeraGrid Pathways Fellowship. The program provides support and resources to allow researchers to engage in TeraGrid immersion, helping them to develop their expertise in science and high-performance computing (HPC) research. Monmouth is part of TeraGrid’s “Campus Champions,” a program now at 43 colleges and universities around the country, including campuses of many types.

“HPC is playing an increasingly important role on the frontiers of science and engineering as more and more of the most interesting and important scientific problems demand large-scale computation,” Fasano said at the time. “Study after study shows that virtually all businesses that adopt HPC consider it indispensable for their ability to compete and survive.”

The Chronicle article also refers to what Fasano calls “a new kind of digital divide.” One is the divide experienced by underrepresented groups in the field, including women and minority groups. The other is one between research universities and smaller institutions that focus on undergraduate education.

“Schools like Monmouth College are in danger of falling behind,” he said earlier this summer. “We are working hard to make sure that not only do we not fall behind, but that we are able to provide the experiences in computationally-intensive problems that will allow our students to excel while still having a well-rounded liberal education.”

Fasano’s proposal addresses both of those divides, bringing a large-scale project to a small-school campus and having the research done by women – sophomores Molly Ball of Charleston and Brittany Shannon of Hudson. The students spent 10 weeks on campus this summer working on the protein-folding project.

Such opportunities are important, Fasano explained to The Chronicle.
“If you want your students to go off to grad school in highly technical fields, it’s really important for them to have this background,” he said.

The upside is that all kinds of colleges – big or small – can now participate in attacking the largest and most socially relevant research questions.