A Center for CS&E

Independently of the final organizational structure of CS&E as it relates to the teaching mission, the Committee recommends the immediate creation of a Center for CS&E that would become the primary home for current and new CS&E faculty, the place for research coordination and computing laboratories. Current CS&E faculty are dispersed over the whole campus, and the Committee strongly believes in the idea of physically co-locating current CS&E faculty, researchers, and students. The Center should be responsible for those efforts that would benefit from centralization and a center environment, i.e., all heavily computing-oriented CS&E research projects. It should provide an interdisciplinary research environment with computation as its focus and could also help with the development of educational efforts in the early phases. The development of such a Center could occur in multiple stages. The first stage of development of a Center would bring together current CS&E faculty at UC Davis, who could also immediately initiate, for example, a Program in CS&E, i.e., current faculty would draw from existing programs and majors to coordinate CS&E-related course material and also institute new ones⁵. Such a Program should be viewed only as a transitional step in the sense that it would merely be supporting the creation of the eventual organizational structure for CS&E education on campus. The Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing (CIPIC) and the Institute of Theoretical Dynamics (ITD) could serve as the basis for the development of a CS&E Center on campus⁶. (Several members of GGAM are associated with ITD.) With a small augmentation of existing administrative support in these two Organized Research Units (ORUs), the Center (and its potential educational Program) for CS&E could immediately begin to develop computer facilities and research and teaching opportunities for current CS&E faculty and students. The Center's associated faculty members would also be actively involved in recruiting and hiring new CS&E faculty⁷. We recommend the recruitment of a small number of senior computational scientists with an international reputation as soon as possible to help with the development of the Center and, possibly, the steering of curricular efforts. The second stage of development of a CS&E Center would be signaled by the final establishment of the organizational structure for CS&E. At this point, the Center's mission should focus on CS&E research and possibly research integration into educational efforts, but the further development of key curricular aspects of CS&E should become the responsibility of the particular unit implemented for CS&E education. At the end of the first stage of the Center's developments, the Center should have a permanent space allocation, preferably in the Academic Surge Building to facilitate interactions with existing research units located in that building. We propose that new faculty hired under the CS&E Initiative would have their primary office and research space in the Center, while their formal (possibly joint) appointments would reside with the potential unit for CS&E and possibly other departments. The Center would function as the catalyst for computational science on campus, and the Center should also become the home for non-tenured CS&E researchers, visiting faculty, or visiting researchers from industry and national laboratories participating in interdisciplinary efforts⁸. In the following, we address issues pertaining to the establishment of a CS&E Center.

• Initial Focus Areas. A small number of new CS&E focus areas that would be targeted for support by the Center should be identified. These should not overlap with programs currently supported by campus ORUs or other research units on campus, but should build on emerging new CS&E efforts building on existing areas of excellence, e.g., computational astrophysics and computational molecular biology.
• Massive Data Problem. A severe problem that is impacting all CS&E fields is the problem of dealing with massive amounts of data to be modeled, to be stored, to be transmitted, and to be analyzed for scientific discovery. The progress in imaging and computing technology is ``flooding'' all CS&E fields with data, and it will be crucial to invest in areas such as data modeling, data organization, database and information system technology, multimedia, high-speed networking, data analysis, visualization, and other fields addressing massive data problems. For example, there is a need for data modeling, including metadata modeling, which is particularly important in interdisciplinary applications. It is crucial to describe data in terms of data formats and data models such that the structure and meaning of the data can easily be understood by and shared among different groups. There exists a definite need in this area concerning both teaching and research⁹.
• Computing Mission for UC Davis. The Center could be responsible for the development and maintenance of the high-performance computing and massive data storage infrastructure of UC Davis. Nevertheless, there is no agreement among the Committee members whether a CS&E Center should or should not take on this responsibility. This would require a strong commitment to supporting permanent personnel, such as technical staff for computer maintenance, system management, and training.
• Resource Requirements. Initially, the Center and associated current faculty would be concerned with the establishment and administration of new CS&E research efforts, bringing together current CS&E faculty. The Center would become the home for current CS&E faculty and new faculty hired under the Initiative. The amount of space, amount (and source) of start-up funding, and amount of the annual budget for the Center must be estimated realistically. In the first stage of the Center's development, resources should be made available based on the assumption that about 15 current UC Davis faculty members in CS&E would be spending a significant amount of their time in the Center. During the second stage of the Center's development, resource commitments should be growing steadily, based on the assumption that the number of Center-affiliated faculty would reach about 45 after a period of about six years--considering the fact that most of the new CS&E faculty would have joint appointments¹⁰.