About PICSciE

The mission of PICSciE is to function as an interdisciplinary computational science and engineering institute in research, education and service.

Background

Computation has become an indispensable tool in almost all science and engineering. It is often referred to as the third paradigm of science together with experiment and theory. Computer simulations are in any cases the only way to connect the advanced theoretical models of today with experimental data.

Computational technology is also reaching fields outside the sciences. Data intensive computing is increasingly becoming standard in the social sciences and part of the humanities. Visualization plays a role in many fields from the arts to the sciences.

In terms of academic disciplines, computational science and engineering is closely connected to computer science and applied mathematics. Lately a substantial part of development has also been done in fields of applications and one often talks about new fields, for example, computational physics, computational chemistry and computational biology.

The fundamental importance of computational science and engineering has been obvious to the Princeton faculty and so has the need to create an interdisciplinary institute. Starting in 1999 a group of faculty began to meet regularly to develop a plan for an institute in computational science and the Princeton administration supported the idea. These were the first steps in the creation of the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE), which had its kick off workshop in October 2002.

Princeton has a proud tradition in computational science dating back to the days of von Neumann. Many of the early achievements in computer science and scientific computing originated in Princeton. With PICSciE we plan to continue that tradition by supporting Princeton as a leading center of research and education in computational science.

Vision

There are two main goals for PICSciE. One is directed towards the science of computation itself. PICSciE aims to become an institute for computational science and engineering of high international research reputation. The other goal is to be a center for computational science and engineering on campus. The institute aims at raising the level of computational activities in research and education of different departments and programs.

Program

Innovative programs in research, education and service are aimed at achieving vision.

Interdisciplinary research groups with participants from different fields of applications together with computer scientists and applied mathematicians are working on a variety of applications and on developing new computational technology. The Institute aims at being a natural meeting place for faculty, postdocs, students and visitors. The PICSciE seminars will cover both applications and techniques of computational science.

The Institute also initiates and coordinates applications of management of research grants and work for attracting funding from different sources.

In education PICSciE will give interdisciplinary courses fitting into many undergraduate and graduate programs. This means partly coordination and cross listing but also whenever necessary the development of new courses. The Program in Integrated Computer and Application Science (PICASSO) is a graduate training program funded by an IGERT grant from the National Science Foundation connected to PICSciE.

The service activities support computational science on campus. They facilitate scientific computing in different Departments by hosting or servicing computational clusters for different groups at Princeton. Experts at the Institute provide a help and may also engage in larger development projects.

For general questions about PICSciE please email picscie@picscie.princeton.edu.

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