At the end of September, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dave Toth and his colleagues from Merrimack College, Jimmy Franco (Chemistry) and Charlotte Berkes (Biology), were awarded two grants of supercomputing time to search for drugs to cure histoplasmosis and inhibit HIV.  Their research team was awarded a total of 1,818,365 hours of compute time on the 40th fastest computer in the world, worth about $148,778.  Toth will use the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to conduct virtual screens of millions of molecules to find the best leads.  Franco and Berkes will then test the best leads in their labs to determine how effective they are and try to devise better molecules based on the structure of the most effective molecules.  The granting entity, the NSF-funded organization known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), awards grants of compute time to scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists for computationally intensive research.