Supercomputer
The Supercomputer
Photo credit: Tonya Rosen-Jones ’97
Oberlin is among the first liberal arts colleges in the nation to provide undergraduates with access to a supercomputer that can process gigantic data sets. It is used to calculate virtually any chemical property of interest.
Purchased in 2005 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, Oberlin's supercomputer has 70 dual, 64 nodes—each with 8 gigabytes of RAM, a gigabit ethernet switch, and a 10-terabyte file server. In addition to its applications in chemistry, physics, astrophysics, and computational biology, the computer provided momentum for an interdisciplinary initiative, the Oberlin Center for Computation and Modeling.