When and Where

January 8th-17th, 2012 in College Station, TX

Rationale

Throughout history, the development of technology-enabling materials has been carried out using mostly experimental approaches. Thanks to recent advances at the theory, software and hardware level, computational materials science has emerged as an extremely valuable tool in the development of new materials.

Goals

The goal of this week-and-a-half Winter School is to introduce some of the most important methods within the Computational Materials Science toolkit to undergraduate and graduate students interested in this emerging field. Since materials science studies multi-scale phenomena, this Winter School will offer modules focused on different methods used to investigate physical phenomena at multiple scales.

Target Audience

The target audience for this Winter School is composed of students and junior researchers (postdocs, faculty) interested in learning more about computational materials science, but who may not be familiar with some (or all) of the methods and techniques used to simulate the behaviors of materials at multiple scales. In a sense, this school should be considered introductory. Participants are expected to at least become aware of the potential (and limitations) of computational materials science.

Organization and Topics

The Winter School will be organized from a top-down perspective, starting with a discussion of theoretical and computational approaches to the understanding of materials phenomena at the continuum scale, working our way down through mesoscale and atomistic approaches, ending our discussions with electronic structure-level descriptions of matter.

The idea is for each day to have a theoretical section in the morning (about 3 hours with a coffee break in between), followed by hands-on laboratory exercises. The organizers (Raymundo Arroyave, Dimitris Lagoudas, Etienne Patoor, Amine Benzerga, Tahir Cagin) will provide with computational resources and software necessary to carry out the hands-on sessions based on specifications on the part of the instructors.

Interactions among participants is fundamental to achieve the full potential of the Winter School and social activities will be planned to provide ample opportunity to exchange experiences and ideas as well as to initiate collaborations that can be fostered within the IIMEC program.

Hardware/Software Available

During the Winter School, students and instructors will have access to a Linux Cluster consisting of 328 CPUs distributed in 30 nodes with 24 GB RAM each. We already have multiple computer simulation software installed (VASP, ABAQUS, LAMMPS, etc). Additional software can be installed at the request of the instructors.

This Winter School will be immediately followed by the IIMEC 3rd Annual Meeting, held in College Station, Texas on January 18-19, 2012.