SEP Computational Science

Overview
Over the past decade computing and data processing have become key elements in virtually all areas of science and engineering. Computational Science is expected to play an important role in the scientific discovery process. ETH as well as the University of Zürich have established several professorships in this strongly multidisciplinary field. This project brings together computational scientist, theoreticians and experimentalists from various fields and backgrounds with the goal to address problems of high complexity in areas such as cell biology or nanomaterials. A shared, virtual infrastructure, the CoLab, is being formed to cater to the collaboration in research and teaching.

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CoLab
Founded in May 2002, the Computational Laboratory (CoLab) provides a platform in Computational Science for ETH researchers and their affiliates. Today, 22 ETH faculty members from seven different departments with their research groups are actively involved in the CoLab programs. The CoLab Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is considered to be one of the key-elements of the Lab. In this program, twelve outstanding young computational scientists have been appointed so far to bring together a broad range of different computational methods. First results have been published already.

Furthermore, six visiting researchers (CoLab Visiting Faculty Program) have thus far visited the Lab to provide the dynamic contact with the outside world. To promote Computational Science in all areas of research, the CoLab started a number of training programs that enjoy an excellent return of attendance and emerging scientific collaboration.

For the Summer School, "Multiscale Modelling and Simulation" to be held at the University of Lugano (Università della Svizzera italiana-USI) in August 2003, the CoLab has been able to invite an outstanding team of researchers and young scientists. The results of the Summer School will be published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering. A selected number of papers will be published in a special edition of the SIAM Journal of Multiscale Modelling and Simulation. Moreover, the CoLab was able to obtain sponsorship from several companies and organizations including, Novartis, Roche, Ciba, Serono, Syngenta, SATW, ICSB, MRS, and the Society of Computational Physics to help support this summer program.

The CoLab is committed to its role as a laboratory for computation and collaboration.

Dr. Sabine Attinger