Computational Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory

The Computation Institute is an intellectual nexus and resource center for scholars from multiple disciplines building and applying computational platforms for science.

The Computation Institute (CI) was established in 2000 as a joint initiative between The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory to advance science through innovative computational approaches. Scholarship in the sciences, arts, and medicine depends increasingly on collection and analysis of large quantities of data and detailed numerical simulations of complex phenomena. Progress is gated by researchers’ ability to construct complex software systems, to harness large-scale computing, and to federate distributed resources. The CI is both an intellectual nexus and resource center for those building and applying such computational platforms for science. As an intellectual nexus, it brings together researchers from different disciplines with common interests in advancing the state-of-the-art in computing and its applications. As a resource center, it provides expert assistance to scholars whose work requires the most advanced computational methods.

Our research has increasingly broad impact as advanced computational and informatics approaches are becoming critical to future research breakthroughs in almost every scientific discipline. Our success is evident in both the people we attract and the projects we have pursued. The CI is home to over 100 researchers and staff, including more than 70 fellows from University of Chicago faculty and Argonne scientists that have active collaborations with over 50 prestigious academic and research institutions across the globe. We have established high-profile, high-impact projects such as CIM-EARTH, Open Science Grid, TeraGrid, Globus, the National Microbial Pathogen Research Center, the Social Informatics Data Grid, and the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. Current research is targeted at solving complex system-level problems in bioinformatics, biomedicine, neuroscience, genomics, metagenomics, energy and climate, astronomy and astrophysics, computational economics, and molecular engineering.