Chemists carrying out frontier research are relying more and more on computers that are capable of handling sophisticated simulations, data analysis and graphics software. The need to accomodate multiple users on a single laboratory computer and multiple uses on a single chemistry department facility can be met by a single solution: individual work stations for the majority of user needs and, for the remainder, ready access to other types of work stations and, ultimately, to a minisupercomputer. This award from the Chemistry Shared Instrumentation Program will help the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to acquire, maintain and operate a multi-access core computing facility. The areas of chemical research that will be enhanced by the acquisition include: 1) The chemistry of transition metal complexes in binucleating macrocycles 2) The use of X-ray diffraction to examine productive enzyme-substrate complexes 3) The chemistry of organometallic compounds containing multiple metal-carbon bonds 4) Asymmetric synthesis 5) Interactions in large molecular arrays and aggregates 6) Dynamics of small polyatomic molecules in highly excited vibrational states 7) Modelling of modified semiconductor surfaces.
