Computational Science & Engineering (CS&E) is now widely accepted, along with theory and experiment, as a crucial third mode of scientific investigation and engineering design. Aerospace, automotive, biological, chemical, semiconductor, and other industrial sectors now rely on simulation for technical decision support. For federal agencies also, CS&E has become an essential support for decisions on resources, transportation, and defense.
CS&E is by nature interdisciplinary. It grows out of physical applications and it depends on computer architecture, but at its heart are powerful algorithms. Much of CS&E has involved analysis, but the future surely includes optimization and design, and especially in the presence of uncertainty. Another mathematical frontier is the assimilation of very large data sets through such techniques as adaptive multiresolution, automated feature search, and low-dimensional parameterization.
SIAM is conducting this conference on CS&E to draw attention to the tremendous range of major computational efforts on large problems in science and engineering, to promote the interdisciplinary culture required to meet these large-scale challenges, and to encourage the training of the next generation of computational scientists.