LANCASTER, Pa. - Two professors at Franklin & Marshall were recently awarded grants.
Fronefield Crawford III, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, earned a $35,000 grant from the Mount Cuba Astronomical Foundation.
Crawford's project, titled "High-performance Cluster Computing for Pulsar Surveys" will provide for computer equipment to support participation in large-scale surveys for new radio pulsars using the Arecibo 305-m radio telescope, which was recently outfitted with a new multi-beam receiver capable of simultaneously observing seven different sky locations. This greatly enhances the telescope's ability to find new pulsars. New pulsar discoveries will provide the raw material for longer-term follow-up studies that have a variety of applications in physics. The funds awarded to Crawford will be used to develop and enhance a high-performance computer cluster at Franklin & Marshall that will be used for processing large amounts of raw survey data collected (totaling about 1 Petabyte). According to Crawford, the data processing is a formidable task and will be shared among pulsar researchers at various institutions (including F&M) that make up the survey consortium. "With this contribution to the larger survey effort, our group at F&M can play a significant role in planned Arecibo pulsar surveys and associated follow-up work," said Crawford. Scott Brewer, assistant professor of chemistry, was awarded 11,000 service units of
supercomputing time at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center through its Development Allocations Committee. The service units will support Brewer's research titled "Combined Experimental and Computational Vibrational Analysis of Short Helical Peptides with Residue Specificity," as well as help him to explore further options of incorporating computations in the physical chemistry courses offered at F&M.
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