Olivia DrakeWhile technology at Wesleyan is growing by leaps and bounds, the computational capacity is growing by gigaFLOPS and now, teraFLOPS. Not to be confused with the prehistoric pterodactyl's beach footwear, a teraFLOP is a term used in high-performance computing to quantify the rate at which computer systems can perform arithmetic operations. TeraFLOPs can perform one trillion operations per second (S), and for scientists at Wesleyan, this means calculations can be done up to 50 times faster with the new computing cluster, installed during the summer 2013. "The new cluster has been revolutionary in my own work," said Francis Starr, professor…
A $298,736 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will allow Wesleyan to remain competitive in numerical modeling research and education on an international level. Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, and Michael Weir, professor of biology, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, received the grant for a project titled “Major Research Instrumentation – Recovery and Reinvestment program (MRI-R2): Acquisition of Shared Cluster and Database Computing Facilities at Wesleyan University.” The grant, awarded over three years beginning May 1, will fund growth of the computer…
Chia Wei "Wade" Hsu '10 and Francis Starr, are co-authors of "Hierarchies of networked phases induced by multiple liquid-liquid critical points," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105, 13711-13715. Hsu and Starr showed that by attaching specific single strands of DNA to nano-sized particles to create customizable "nano-atoms," they could generate new materials with phase diagrams never previously seen in nature. Their work is based on a massive set of computations on the new university computer cluster. Fred Ellis, professor of physics, is Hsu’s faculty advisor.