ACEmat Vision

Discussion Paper: The Role of ACEmat

The ACENET Institute for Materials Modelling and Simulation (ACEmat) is an emerging effort to coordinate, develop and support activities focussing on the materials modelling research community in Atlantic Canada. ACEmat is a cooperative effort with (and financially supported by) ACENET, the high performance computing consortium that provides computational facilities to university researchers in the Atlantic Provinces.

The original CFI funding proposal that led to the creation of ACENET proposed to establish three ACENET Institutes (materials science, advanced computational science and computational chemistry). These institutes were seen as playing key role in fostering collaboration in these key areas between the various Universities in Atlantic Canada.

The vision behind the institutes was to utilize ACENET’s organizational and technical resources to enable the collaboration and exchange of information between researchers in certain key areas in order that they might effectively function as if in a single department. Using technologies such as ACCESSgrid would provide researchers the equivalent of a walk along the corridor to consult with a colleague and allow faculty, postdocs and graduate students to belong to a much larger and diverse research community.

This would be complemented by regular workshops and meetings to establish personal contacts and to provide training and to allow researchers to become aware of activities in their areas of expertise at other Universities in Atlantic Canada. As well these workshops could be used to provide training and bring in speakers.

In addition to the concept of a “virtual department” the ACENET institutes are also seen as an important means for the research communities provide guidance to ACENET on their acquisitions (software and hardware), resource allocation and technical support. This is critical if ACENET is to accomplish its stated mission “To provide Atlantic Canada with a distributed technology platform which will enable researchers to gain access to the collaboration tools and high performance computing resources that are necessary to conduct quality research”.

ACEmat is currently run by a steering committee consisting of the orginal three members (DeBell, Poole and Whitehead) and three new members (Merschrod, Opps and Rutenberg). ACENET has provided the three ACENET Institutes with an initial budget of $5,000 for the current fiscal year, much of which is committed to funding the current workshop. The further financial support from ACENET both for the current fiscal year and in the coming years is possible.

For discussion

• Is this vision for ACEmat a valid and a useful one?
• If so, what activities should ACEmat undertake to best achieve this vision?
• And how should ACEmat function as an organisation to best achieve this vision?

Things ACEmat could do

ACEmat workshop(s)

1. Host an annual regional meeting of researchers and students. Emphasis both on sharing research results, and intra-regional networking. Lots of student talks, so they get practice and exposure.
2. Host an annual (or biannual), national meeting on materials modeling research. Specific theme and location could vary from one event to the next. Location rotates around Atlantic Canada. This could be modeled on the Gordon Conference series or the (now discontinued) CPiP conferences.
3. Organize a regional “industry meets academia” workshop. With help from ACOA and the regional NSERC office, get a bunch of private sector speakers to tell us about problems they have where materials modeling would help. Great for researchers looking for commercial partners. Great for students to learn about relevance of modeling. Great optics for ACENET, ACOA and NSERC. Raises the profile of the modeling community in Atlantic Canada in the eyes of government and the private sector.

Training and Education

• Organize/conduct materials modeling seminars over AccessGrid.
• Coordinate outside speakers who can visit more than one institution.
• Organize HPC training as required (i.e. driven by community demand) to support ACEmat users.
• Share grad programs among institutions (exploiting AccessGrid). Or at least grad courses. And/or develop new interdisciplinary grad programs that span multiple institutions.

Communication and Collaboration

Establish a website/wiki. Set up web form so that materials modelers in the region can self-identify, and register themselves as “ACEmat members”. This gives us our emailing list, and helps identify the community that ACEmat serves.