Welcome to The Computational
Chemistry for Pre-College Students (CCPS) website!
CCPS is a research-grade scientific portal that contains three of the most
widely used research software programs (GAMESS, Tinker, and MOPAC)
for calculating the structure and properties of chemical molecules. These computationally
intensive calculations are distributed to the computers of participating users
via the Global Grid Exchange® (G2EX),
the largest computing grid in the country. G2EX uses the
Frontier® Grid Platform
developed by Parabon® Computation , the
company that also developed the grid infrastructure that powers this portal.
CCPS is provided free of charge to all pre-college students and
their teachers. It should be used in the same
manner as the chemistry educator uses his or her wet lab facilities
— as a place to explore basic chemistry concepts, validate lessons learned
in the classroom, and introduce chemistry students to the tools and techniques
that chemists use to study chemistry. Individual students or small groups of
students can also use the service to explore topics in more detail, or to develop
projects for submission to local, regional, state, or national science competitions.
Opening An Account
There are two types of accounts available for this resource:
Classroom accounts: these accounts are available to chemistry
teachers who desire to provide students with an opportunity to explore the
technologies, techniques, and tools of computational chemistry. These accounts
are provided over a limited timeframe, and job limits are set at four (4) minutes
for a single run, with 20 minutes of total CPU time per student.
Research accounts: these accounts are available to individual
students or teams of students wishing to pursue an independent research project.
Job limits are set following discussion with the CCPS project managers.
Click here for information on how you or
your class can sign up for the program and contribute the idle computational
capacity of your computers to this exciting initiative.
If you'd like to take CCPS for a spin before opening an account, you can
login to the server using our "Guest" account. Simply
click on the login button, and type in "guest" as your username and password.
You can run jobs up that require up to two minutes of computing time.
For bigger jobs, you have to apply for a free account!
"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a
large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely
known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws
leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble."