As the Computational Materials Science discipline affects all fields of Science and Engineering, the Materials Computation Center (MCC) is actively developing powerful, leading-edge tools to analyze and predict the properties of materials. MCC provides an intellectual and interactive environment for students, teachers, and researchers focused on world-class, multidisciplinary education and research in Computational Materials Science.
Our research topics are:
The Research overview webpage links to presentation slides, publications, and posters for each research topic. Our affiliates use the Beowolf computer cluster and the Apple Turing Cluster.
The 2005 Summer School offered a hands-on introduction to electronic structure and thermodynamics calculations of real materials to more than 70 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty from the U.S. and abroad.
Equally important is our education focus. Each year, the MCC organizes a Summer School on Computational Materials Science.
The Summer Schools provide graduate-level training modules on various topics in computational materials science. These modules and other codes are distributed through MCC’s Software Archive.
MCC members participate in Research Experience for Undergraduates projects.
The MCC also supports two yearly conferences: Understanding Complex Systems and Recent Developments in Electronic Structure. Additionally, the MCC hosts meetings on behalf of the National Science Foundation.
The MCC's web-based Software Archive contains research and education codes intended as a shared resource to foster vibrant interactions, to encourage communication between the developers and end users, and to eliminate redundant code and algorithm development. The Software Archive is a community service, and we invite and encourage all interested parties to contribute.
Through its Travel Award Program and Visitors Program, the MCC brings together leading faculty, students and researchers from different disciplines, with varied and necessary expertise. The MCC collaborates with similar efforts in Europe, such as PSI-k and CECAM, and with DOE, DOD, and NIST Laboratories.
In Fall 2004, Yong Tae Oh and three other Seoul National University students won a competition for a grant to visit computational materials research centers, and visited with Duane Johnson and Jeongnim Kim during their time in the United States.
Computational Materials Science has emerged as an important discipline that will change the course of most fields of science and engineering. Computation is a powerful tool for analyzing, understanding, and predicting the properties of materials because it serves as a bridge between theoretical understanding and experiment. Experiment, Theory and Computation thus form three synergistic parts of modern materials research.
With Computational Materials Science rapidly evolving and growing in importance, it is critical to develop algorithms in conjunction with new theoretical developments, modern computer science approaches, and real experiments. To accomplish the long-term goals, there must be multidisciplinary education of future computational materials scientists, active networking of researchers and students with the world-wide community, creation of useful tools for research, and applications to challenging problems in materials research. There is no better place to do this than at The Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at UIUC.
Because of the increasing importance of computational materials science as a discipline (which crosses many of the traditional disciplines), both research and education must be at the forefront and are significantly enhanced by being part of world-class research. The MCC will foster a stimulating intellectual and interactive environment and facilities for students, teachers and researchers focused on research and education in computational materials science.
Our Center will develop, maintain and update libraries of computer codes and we will actively collaborate with similar efforts elsewhere, such as those at DOE Laboratories, NIST, the DOD, and efforts overseas. While we will use efficient commercial packages when appropriate and will work when appropriate with companies such in code development, the Center will not be a provider of "black box" routines. Instead, it will be a Center for developing new approaches and for understanding of materials using advanced computational methods.
The MRL is a unique entity having unsurpassed experimental user facilities, available to academic and government researchers.
Although composed of a coordinated, interdisciplinary group of faculty throughout Engineering and Chemistry, The MCC is headquartered and supported by facilities and services by the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL).
The MRL is an ideal setting for MCC. It brings together the distributed strengths of the University of Illinois in the areas of materials (with leading departments in Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and other departments) plus strengths in computation in the Computer Science Department, the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA), Computational Electronics, the Computational Biology program, the ASCI-supported "Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets", and other programs. As a part of the UIUC Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Program, we will use existing infrastructure and establish regular courses to train students in computational methods with applications to problems in materials science.
The MRL is a unique entity having unsurpassed experimental user facilities, available to academic and government researchers, as well as the MRL Center for Computation which provides daily computer support, maintains current software standards on the computers, and maintains a small DEC computing cluster for development work in the MCC.
