The CSE Community Converges The First IEEE Computer Society Workshop On Computational Science And Engineering

The First IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Computational Science and Engineering brought together participants from academia, industry, and government to examine issues and activities in education, employment, research, and development. The 70 participants, who met in October 1996 at Purdue University, represented many viewpoints and came from several countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. They considered four basic questions for CSE:Who is doing what now?What is working well and why?What is not working well and why?What does the future hold?These questions permeated the 13 presentations, the three panels, and the many lively discussions during the workshop. The full agenda is available at http://www.cse.purdue.edu/ieee.workshop/Outline.html.This theme section in IEEE Computational Science & Engineering includes material from five of the presentations plus Steve Stevenson's personal view of the workshop. Dianne O'Leary explores the relationship between the two distinct, but still very similar, disciplines of CSE and applied mathematics. Tom Marchioro and Rubin Landau discuss the enormous educational challenges in CSE and describe interesting developments in using the World Wide Web to supplement traditional course work. Les Hatton presents a summary of his in-depth studies of the accuracy, correctness, and reliability of large production codes from science and engineering applications. It is disturbing reading and underscores the neglect that software quality has received in science and engineering (and in other areas too!). Efstratios Gallopoulos and Ahmed Sameh provide a view of the relationship between computing and science and of what computational scientists and engineers might be expected to do. And I sketch a scenario of the future evolution of scientific software systems, one that poses many challenges (and opportunities) for science, engineering, CSE, and computer science.