Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate computational chemistRY (MERCURY) is an NSF-funded consortium composed of 27 computational chemistry faculty from 25 primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) across the US. The consortium members share NSF-funded high performance computing (HPC) resources and meet at an annual MERCURY conference to present their research and network.

The consortium members share high performance computing (HPC) facilities to advance their research. The first three HPC resources included commodity Linux clusters and shared memory machines from SGI. The fourth and current Linux cluster named Marcy is hosted at Furman University and it has been in full production since May 2013. Preparations are underway to bring the fifth and newest cluster, Skylake, into production in late Spring 2017.

One of the core components of the consortium is the annual MERCURY conference. The 17th annual MERCURY conference and the second one held at Furman University in Greenville, SC this summer. The previous six were hosted at Bucknell University while the first ten were held at Hamilton College.  It generally includes six speakers who present excellent talks that provide background and specific findings in their respective fields, plus an undergraduate poster session and evening social networking events. This year’s conference will also include a MolSSI coding workshop for up to 30 attendants.