Centre for Computational Materials Science (CCMS)
The Centre for Computational Materials Science (CCMS), a constituent of ICMS, is one of the most
powerful academic computing resources in the country.
The Centre is equipped with a High Performance Computing Facility. This facility is a HP XC
Cluster, comprising of 128 nodes of dual core, dual CPU Xeon Woodcrest CPUs over a low latency
network. The theoretical peak performance of this configuration is estimated at 6 TFLOPS.
An Instructional Computing Laboratory, containing 30 computers enables the students attending
workshops to acquire hands-on experience in writing and running sophisticated codes.
CCMS provides a variety of analytical and computational tools to carry out research in the broad area of computational materials science.
CCMS also carries out a number of outreach activities: in addition to an active Visitors'
programme. Several schools and conferences are conducted every year with theoretical and
practical sessions.
The first of these schools was marked by a unique feature: all the lecturers and students worked
together on a research problem, which has resulted in a paper with 64 authors.
The list of topics studied in recent years is rich and diverse, including: the electronic structure of
nanomaterials, charge transport and catalysis in nanosystems, novel magnetic materials and their
properties, non-linear optical materials, disordered systems, biomimetic systems and biomaterials.
The techniques employed include ab initio calculations, molecular dynamics simulations and many
body theory. Research is also carried out on developing various techniques, such as free energy
methods to study phase transitions, novel ways of using geometric phases to get information
about material properties, and new formulations of configuration interaction methods.
For details contact:
Prof. Balasubramanian Sundaram
Coordinator
