Mission

The mission of the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) is to facilitate interdisciplinary computational science and engineering research, education and service at Princeton University.

Background

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

Computational technology is also reaching into fields outside the traditional areas. Data intensive computing is increasingly becoming standard in the social sciences and parts of the humanities. Visualization plays an increasingly significant role in many fields from the arts to the sciences.

In terms of academic disciplines, computational science and engineering have been closely connected to computer science and to applied mathematics. Lately, substantial advancements have also been attained in fields of applications with rapid progress being made in new fields, for example, computational physics, computational chemistry and computational biology.

Created in 2002 by a group of faculty interested in developing an institute in computational science in collaboration with the Princeton University administration, PICSciE has grown to include membership from most of the engineering and science departments on campus as well as with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). There has been a quite rapid growth of the computational power available to PICSciE users with the current throughput on five machines of various architectures putting us in the top rank of academic institutions. It moved into its permanent quarters in the new Gehry-designed Lewis Library in the Fall of 2008, with space allocated for computational hardware, visualization and offices for staff, faculty and postdoctoral fellows.

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

PICSciE aims to achieve the highest levels of international distinction in the discovery and transmission of knowledge and understanding in the area of computational science and engineering.

We hope to provide infrastructure, through the Terascale Infrastructure for Groundbreaking Research in Engineering and Science (TIGRESS) High Performance Computing (HPC) Center, with regard to a range of computational platforms, storage and visualization that establishes us in a leadership position among US research universities. This  will also serve to provide the practical experience needed to help the Princeton computational research community to more effectively apply for computing time available on the most powerful machines at the national DOE and NSF supercomputing centers. We also hope that our support staff can be useful to the Princeton research community in helping them to achieve their goals in computation and visualization. Research support includes provision of software, system administration and porting, tuning, debugging, and developing computational codes.

Also, we hope to provide a welcoming home for seminars, workshops, mini-courses and all the intellectual infrastructure that provides the human and educational basis for scientific and technical progress in computational areas.

In education, PICSciE hopes to offer a suite interdisciplinary courses fitting into many undergraduate and graduate programs. This means not only coordinating and cross listing courses, but also developing new courses to meet the changing needs in the field. 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 Institute also wishes to be of service in initiating and coordinating applications and management of research grants and work for attracting funding from a variety of sources.

Above all, PICSciE hopes to be of service to the faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students performing computational research on Princeton University's campus.