Plans for joint computational science center announced

In addition to the joint research projects described in the accompanying story, the University and Argonne National Laboratory have agreed to establish a joint Resource Center for Computational Science. Seed funding of $40,000 for the center was provided from the ANL/U of C Collaborative Grants Program, but an additional $190,000 is being provided in equal parts by the University and Argonne.

The center will be headed jointly by Robert Rosner, Professor and Chairman of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and Rick Stevens, Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne, and will involve faculty from the Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences divisions and staff from several Argonne divisions.

Initial areas of interest include scientific visualization, high-speed networking and data storage and parallel processing. Among the problems the center may help explore are the computer-aided identification of lesions in mammograms, the interpretation of nuclear magnetic resonance data for protein structure, the identification of astrophysical radiation sources and the investigation of vortices in superconductors.

"Computational science is starting to be recognized as its own discipline," said Rosner. "It's an exciting new field that has implications for a wide variety of areas in the physical and biological sciences. With this new center, we'll be able to develop resources in a coherent way, exploiting the new power of computers in areas such as computational simulation and computer graphics."