Mark Gordon recognized by IBM

Mark Gordon, Distinguished Professor of liberal arts and sciences and the Frances M. Craig Chair of chemistry, has received a 2007 IBM Faculty Award for his work on perfecting quantum chemistry software models to run on IBM's Blue Gene® supercomputers. These massively parallel machines can handle vast amounts of data and perform trillions of calculations per second, yet use only a fraction of the power and space required by other systems.

The better Gordon and his coworkers optimize their code, written for a technical software program known as GAMESS, to run on Blue Gene, the greater the advantage scientists gain in modeling complex physical, chemical and biological systems to solve problems of a molecular nature, such as developing new pharmaceuticals and designing alternative fuels.

The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive worldwide program with the goal of fostering collaborations between researchers at leading universities throughout the world and those in IBM research, development and service organizations.

The IBM Faculty Award of $40,000 will allow Gordon and his Ames Laboratory research group to continue their research, exploiting the full potential of GAMESS and Blue Gene's immense computational horsepower. This will include interfacing with IBM researchers in Rochester, Minn. and Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where the Gordon group has already run several important benchmarks.

"Blue Gene is an important instrument of discovery for scientists across many disciplines," said Sam Ellis, Blue Gene development manager for IBM in Rochester, Minn. "We're pleased to recognize the work that professor Gordon's team has done on behalf of chemistry researchers around the globe."

The 2007 IBM Faculty Award extends the successful relationship Gordon and several members of his research group have had with IBM over the past 25 years. "It's been a tremendous, mutually beneficial relationship," said Gordon, who is also a program director of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "The benefits to us and to the entire computational chemistry community are that the relationship with IBM not only aids us in doing good science, but also helps us in developing the GAMESS programs, which currently serve an estimated 100,000 users in more than 100 countries."