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AUSTIN, Texas - A new institute to provide the intellectual leadership and infrastructure for conducting world-class interdisciplinary research in the fields of computational science, engineering and technology has been created at The University of Texas at Austin. The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) was made possible by a $38 million investment, $15 million from an anonymous donor, $8 million from industrial partners and $15 million in university matching funds, said Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, president of The University of Texas at Austin. The partners are Dell Computer Corporation, Cray, Incorporated, IBM, Force10 Networks, Microsoft, Nortel, Platform Computing, StorageTek, Sun, TeraBurst, MirraCom Inc. and United Devices. The initiative includes the creation of new endowed chairs in key areas of computational science and technology, including distributed and grid computing, computational biology or biomedical science and engineering, and computational mechanics and materials. "Computational engineering and technology are arenas that will affect virtually every aspect of our lives in the 21st century," said Faulkner. "The technological advancement of our state and nation hinges on these critical fields of endeavor." ICES will include and build on the existing Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (TICAM) by expanding its programs into these new areas of computational engineering and sciences while continuing to support the Center for Subsurface Modeling, the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the Center for Computational Finance, the Center for Numerical Analysis, the Applied Mathematics Group and the Center for Computational Visualization. The institute also will receive substantial expansions of endowments for supporting research operations, hosting visiting scholars, acquiring advanced IT equipment and providing technical support to ICES researchers. The initiative also includes the acquisition and operation of state-of-the-art high performance computing (HPC) platforms, scientific visualization, massive data storage and high-speed network equipment that will be supported by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The new HPC systems are expected to be two of the most powerful computing systems dedicated to academic research in the world. One HPC platform will be a high-performance computing cluster of Dell systems that has a theoretical peak performance of more than three trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops). Dell and Cray, Inc., have partnered to deploy the cluster. The other HPC system will be an upgrade to bring TACC's current IBM Power4 computing system to more than 200 processors and more than one teraflop. Additional new equipment will provide fast access to and storage of the massive amounts of data that will be generated by these terascale HPC systems and enable large-scale data visualization and knowledge discovery. New network equipment will enable rapid transfers of scientific data between the TACC HPC, storage and visualization systems and between ICES research workstations and clusters. TACC and the new ICES Center for Distributed & Grid Computing will integrate this new infrastructure into a new campus computing grid. The grid will enable ICES researchers to seamlessly harness the collective computational power of their own workstations and clusters combined with the new HPC systems for solving even more complex computational challenges. The University of Texas at Austin grid will be connected to the emerging regional and national grids, such as the Texas Internet Grid for Research & Education and the National Science Foundation TeraGrid, to provide ICES researchers with access to even greater collective computational power that will include other universities and computing centers. ICES also is the home of an academic program leading to advanced degrees in computational and applied mathematics (CAM), with options in computational engineering and science. This program, which includes 60 faculty members from 14 academic departments and three colleges, is expected to grow to about 90 faculty members. The academic program is flexible, allowing students to enter the program with degrees in engineering, physics, chemistry, general sciences, mathematics and computer sciences. All are expected to demonstrate a graduate-level proficiency in applied mathematics, numerical analysis, scientific computation, mathematical modeling and applications, the latter area providing the flexibility to include the many new disciplines to be in the expanded program. The institute is housed within the world-class Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences building in the center of The University of Texas at Austin campus. This six-story, 186,000-square-foot structure contains state-of-the-art technology to support interdisciplinary research and graduate study in computational science and engineering. Designed to attract outstanding students, scientists and engineers from around the world, the facility houses a 2,900-square-foot visualization lab, bandwidth-intensive research space for more than 300 graduate students, electronic seminar and videoconferencing rooms and fully equipped offices for visiting researchers. The fourth floor of the building will be finished to accommodate the expanded graduate and research programs. Professor J. Tinsley Oden will be director of the new institute. Organizationally, ICES reports to Dr. Juan Sanchez, the vice president for research, and the director holds the title of associate vice president for research. "I believe there are few, if any, programs worldwide with the breadth and level of commitment one can find here in ICES," said Oden, a member of the National Academy of Engineering who holds the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. "Some years ago, the university identified computational engineering and science and information technology as intellectual disciplines that are strategically important to the nation and to the advancement of science and technology. The university is committed to developing leading academic and research programs in these areas. This new investment, new chair positions, office and laboratory space, the acquisition of modern computer equipment and the significant increase in the breadth of interdisciplinary programs represent an important step toward fulfilling that goal."