E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.
The Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech was a research institute specializing in bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology. The institute had more than 250 personnel, including over 50 tenured and research faculty. Research at the institute involved collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology and medicine. The institute developed -omic and bioinformatic tools and databases that can be applied to the study of human, animal and plant diseases as well as the discovery of new vaccine, drug and diagnostic targets.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
Neuroinformatics is the emergent field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
Materials informatics is a field of study that applies the principles of informatics and data science to materials science and engineering to improve the understanding, use, selection, development, and discovery of materials. The term "materials informatics" is frequently used interchangeably with "data science", "machine learning", and "artificial intelligence" by the community. This is an emerging field, with a goal to achieve high-speed and robust acquisition, management, analysis, and dissemination of diverse materials data with the goal of greatly reducing the time and risk required to develop, produce, and deploy new materials, which generally takes longer than 20 years. This field of endeavor is not limited to some traditional understandings of the relationship between materials and information. Some more narrow interpretations include combinatorial chemistry, process modeling, materials databases, materials data management, and product life cycle management. Materials informatics is at the convergence of these concepts, but also transcends them and has the potential to achieve greater insights and deeper understanding by applying lessons learned from data gathered on one type of material to others. By gathering appropriate meta data, the value of each individual data point can be greatly expanded.
Multiscale modeling or multiscale mathematics is the field of solving problems that have important features at multiple scales of time and/or space. Important problems include multiscale modeling of fluids, solids, polymers, proteins, nucleic acids as well as various physical and chemical phenomena.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high-performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis and storage systems, software, research and development, and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) is an approach to design products, the materials that comprise them, and their associated materials processing methods by linking materials models at multiple length scales. Key words are "Integrated", involving integrating models at multiple length scales, and "Engineering", signifying industrial utility. The focus is on the materials, i.e. understanding how processes produce material structures, how those structures give rise to material properties, and how to select materials for a given application. The key links are process-structures-properties-performance. The National Academies report describes the need for using multiscale materials modeling to capture the process-structures-properties-performance of a material.
The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) was created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve infrastructure design and construction practices to prevent or minimize damage during an earthquake or tsunami. Its headquarters were at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana as part of cooperative agreement #CMMI-0927178, and it ran from 2009 till 2014. The mission of NEES is to accelerate improvements in seismic design and performance by serving as a collaboratory for discovery and innovation.
DataNet, or Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partner, was a research program of the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The office announced a request for proposals with this title on September 28, 2007. The lead paragraph of its synopsis describes the program as:
Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and increasingly data-intensive. Digital data are not only the output of research but provide input to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. Therein lies one of the major challenges of this scientific generation: how to develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams. This solicitation addresses that challenge by creating a set of exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations that provide unique opportunities to communities of researchers to advance science and/or engineering research and learning.
Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) was launched in 2004 as a collaboration involving the State of North Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), Duke University, and North Carolina State University. RENCI is organizationally structured as a research institute within UNC-CH, and its main campus is located in Chapel Hill, NC, a few miles from the UNC-CH campus. RENCI has engagement centers at UNC-CH, Duke University (Durham), and North Carolina State University (Raleigh).
nanoHUB.org is a science and engineering gateway comprising community-contributed resources and geared toward education, professional networking, and interactive simulation tools for nanotechnology. Funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), it is a product of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). NCN supports research efforts in nanoelectronics; nanomaterials; nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS); nanofluidics; nanomedicine, nanobiology; and nanophotonics.
The Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) is an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is part of the United States Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. CSAR's goal is to accurately predict the performance, reliability, and safety of solid propellant rockets.
Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) is a U.S. National Science Foundation program.
Mark F. Horstemeyer is the Dean of the School of Engineering at Liberty University. He was the Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University (MSU) and professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Mississippi State University (2002–2018), holding a Chair position for the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) in Computational Solid Mechanics; he was also the Chief Technical Officer for CAVS. Before coming to MSU, he worked for Sandia National Laboratories for fifteen years (1987-2002) in the area of multiscale modeling for design.
Computational materials science and engineering uses modeling, simulation, theory, and informatics to understand materials. The main goals include discovering new materials, determining material behavior and mechanisms, explaining experiments, and exploring materials theories. It is analogous to computational chemistry and computational biology as an increasingly important subfield of materials science.
The Open Knowledgebase of Interatomic Models (OpenKIM). is a cyberinfrastructure funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) focused on improving the reliability and reproducibility of molecular and multi-scale simulations in computational materials science. It includes a repository of interatomic potentials that are exhaustively tested with user-developed integrity tests, tools to help select among existing potentials and develop new ones, extensive metadata on potentials and their developers, and standard integration methods for using interatomic potentials in major simulation codes. OpenKIM is a member of DataCite and provides unique DOIs (Digital object identifier) for all archived content on the site (fitted models, validation tests, etc.) in order to properly document and provide recognition to content contributors. OpenKIM is also an eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Science Gateway, and all content on openkim.org is available under open source licenses in support of the open science initiative.
Somnath Ghosh is the Michael G. Callas Chair Professor in the Department of Civil & Systems Engineering and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He is the founding director of the JHU Center for Integrated Structure-Materials Modeling and Simulation (CISMMS) and was the director of an Air Force Center of Excellence in Integrated Materials Modeling (CEIMM). Prior to his appointment at JHU, Ghosh was the John B. Nordholt Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at Ohio State University. He is a fellow of several professional societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Carlos Federico López Restrepo is a Colombian-American scientist who researches network-driven biological processes using computational tools. Until March 2022, López was an Associate Professor of Biochemistry & Pharmacology & Biomedical Informatics & Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is currently a Principal Scientist and Lead, Multiscale Modeling at Altos Labs.
