Working Groups

Brainstorm Meeting on Computational Science for Energy

On May 17-20 2009, the director Wanda Andreoni and Dr Claude Guet from CEA-France convened this meeting with the explicit intention to involve CECAM in the outstanding problems the world is facing in the search for alternative Energy solutions.

The scope of this informal discussion meeting was twofold:

• Identify the most crucial scientific issues one has to face in the research related to the "energy problem" and in particular those that computational advanced approaches could help to solve, and
• Clarify which theoretical and computational methods one should develop and/or use to tackle specific problems, and which resources are needed to accomplish the tasks.

We gathered a selected small group of experts of the "energy problem" and/or physically-based computer simulations from academia, government and industry. The topics, focused on solar energy, nuclear energy, hydrogen production and storage, fuel cells.

Many suggestions have come out of this meeting for workshops and other activities to be promoted by CECAM. In particular, a working group on Computational Material Science for Energy will be created.

Download programme folio (PDF 1.0MB)

Download abstracts (PDF 3.6MB)

Scientific software development: a new CECAM initiative.

On March 30-31 2009, the director (Wanda Andreoni) and vice-president (Paul Durham) of CECAM convened a meeting at CECAM Headquarters in Lausanne of a group of scientists with the aim of reflecting upon the possible role CECAM could play in enhancing European scientific software development and support. The members of this group (see below) will work towards the formulation of specific recommendations for the Council.

• Alessandro Curioni (IBM Research Zurich)
• Stefano de Gironcoli (SISSA, Trieste)
• Mauro Ferrario (University of Modena)
• Xavier Gonze (University of Louvain)
• Christian Holm (University of Stuttgart)
• Wim Klopper (University of Karlsruhe)
• Mike Payne (University of Cambridge)
• Bill Smith (Daresbury Laboratory)
• Godehard Sutmann (Research Centre Jülich)
• Doros Theodorou (University of Athens)

Other scientists will be invited to join the group. Mauro Ferrario and Alessandro Curioni have accepted to act as chairman and vice-chairman respectively. Volker Heine (University of Cambridge) and Vassilis Pontikis (CEA, France), chair of the organising committee for the ESF Forward Look (European Computational Science Forum: the Lincei Initiative), were also invited to this meeting.