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. This is the 16th annual MERCURY conference and the first one held at Furman University in Greenville, SC on July 20 – 22, 2017. The last five were hosted at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA and the first ten were at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY.  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 includes a post-conference MolSSI coding workshop on the Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, July 22-23, 2017 for up to 30 attendants.