CSE as an Emerging Discipline

Computation is now regarded as an equal and indispensable partner, along with theory and experiment, in the advance of scientific knowledge and engineering practice. Numerical simulation enables the study of complex systems and natural phenomena that would be too expensive or dangerous, or even impossible, to study by direct experimentation. The quest for ever higher levels of detail and realism in such simulations requires enormous computational capacity. Due to advances in computers and algorithms, computational scientists and engineers can now solve large-scale problems that were once thought intractable.

Computational science and engineering (CSE) is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary area with connections to the sciences, engineering, mathematics and computer science. CSE focuses on the development of problem-solving methodologies and robust tools for the solution of scientific and engineering problems. We believe that CSE will play an important if not dominating role for the future of the scientific discovery process and engineering design.

Although some researchers have been doing what might now be called CSE research for quite some time, for a number of reasons we appear to be at a critical juncture in terms of the role being played by simulation in science and industry. Increasingly, simulation is being used as an integral part of the manufacturing, design and decision-making processes, and as a fundamental tool for scientific research. This is due in large part to the fact that now we can address complex and realistic problems that just a few years ago were out of reach. Problems of worldwide and national interest where CSE has played and is expected to continue to play a pivotal role include weather and climate prediction, combustion, nuclear stockpile stewardship, vehicle simulation and design and control, aircraft design, electronic design automation, design of biomedical devices, computational biology, computational chemistry, materials, tissue engineering, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and molecular biology. At UCSB, research areas where CSE can be expected to play an immediate and important role include fluid dynamics, control, microfluidics (MEMS), and multiscale modeling of materials systems, as well as many others.

Growth in the expectations for and applications of CSE methodology has been fueled by rapid and sustained advances over the past twenty years of computing power and algorithm speed and reliability (see Figure ()), and the emergence of software tools for the development and integration of complex software systems and the visualization of results. In many areas of science and engineering, the boundary has been crossed where simulation, or simulation in combination with experiment is more effective (in some combination of time/cost/accuracy) than experiment alone for real needs.

  

Figure: Growth in algorithm and computing speed over the past 30 years. Algorithms are plotted in the time period in which they were the method of choice, against the relative speed of that algorithm on a standard problem, using 1970 as a baseline.

There is growing recognition of CSE as a discipline in the academic community at large. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) recently outlined its plans for supporting its rapidly expanding membership in the CSE area via a document written by the SIAM Working Group on Computational Science and Engineering Education, chaired by Professor Petzold of UCSB. The document is available at www.siam.org/cse. SIAM recently held, in cooperation with AIChE, its first Conference on CSE. The meeting was very successful and had an attendance of over 475. The magazine Computing in Science and Engineering, published by IEEE, is devoted to CSE research and education and enjoys a large readership. The SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and the Journal of Computational Physics are mainstream journals for CSE, although this multidisciplinary research can and does appear in a wide variety of research journals.