Collaborative Research: CI-Team Demonstration: Towards a Culture of Computational Science

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Rapid developments in cyberinfrastructure are revolutionizing the practice of science and engineering. As the power and reach of computers has grown, computational science has emerged as the third branch of science, complementing analytical theory and experiment. In many fields, especially engineering disciplines and physical and biological sciences, the problems that must be solved are so complex that computation has overtaken pure analytic theory in importance. Despite the growth in importance of the field and in demand for practitioners, academic institutions have been slow to react. At most colleges and universities there is little in the way of a curriculum in computational science. The significance of this was made clear in the recently published report of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), "Computational Science: Ensuring America's Competitiveness" (PITAC 2006). The report specifically noted that the existing educational infrastructure could not meet this need and highlighted the failure of universities to adapt to the new needs of students, both graduate and undergraduate, for education in computational disciplines. The report issued a very specific call: It is past time for universities to take action. They must examine their educational practices and organizational structures to provide and reward interdisciplinary and collaborative research and education. New structures, programs, and institutional incentives are urgently required (PITAC 2006).The failure of academic institutions to prepare students and to encourage their faculty to learn new approaches threatens to compromise U.S. scientific leadership and economic competitiveness in a rapidly changing world. This project will develop essential components comprising a first step toward "changing the culture" at the University of Virginia, while creating a strategy that will be extensible, sustainable, and exportable. Our solution consists of a multi-pronged strategy including formal coursework, outreach to faculty, and collaboration with nearby institutions such as Sweet Briar College (an all women's school) so as to provide practical experience in the use of computational tools and infrastructure to a wide audience in the university community. Broader ImpactThis project will affect both the culture of science and engineering at UVA and beyond. It will improve the quality of research at Virginia by fostering a change in culture towards inter-disciplinary computational science and by training our students, research scientists, and faculty in contemporary computational techniques and the use of the emerging cyberinfrastructure. A similar change will be experienced both by our partner institutions and by the companies and universities downstream. The downstream effects, better research and product development, will improve US economic competitiveness.