Doctoral Education in Computational Science at Stony Brook

Stony Brook offers an exciting and diverse array of opportunities for students interested in pursuing advanced education in computational science. The education and training has two focal points. One, within a traditional academic department, is to use supercomputing as a tool for discovery in disciplinary research. The other, in the New York Center for Computational Science (NYCCS), involves learning and sharing computing ideas, methods, and tools. In this way we offer the bedrock training of solid disciplinary knowledge combined with modern computational skills and opportunities.

Students enroll in a department of their choice and meet all of its DOCTORAL requirements; at the same time, they are encouraged to affiliate with NYCCS AND participate in its events.

HARDWARE: The computational science hardware consists of two systems of vastly different scope, and well as a number of significant systems associated with individual departments and research groups.

The flagship is a supercomputer of the 100 Teraflops class. The computer will be owned by Stony Brook, located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and jointly operated by the two institutions. Portions of the time on this machine will be reserved for researchers at Stony Brook and BNL, portions will be reserved for computational scientists located at other New York State institutions. The smaller, but still very significant machine is a 3.6 Teraflops cluster computer built from Dell hardware. It is called Seawulf, which is an amalgam of the Stony Brook mascot Seawolf and the name Beowulf associated with linux cluster computers of this class.

FACULTY: Scores of Stony Brook faculty are engaged in supercomputing, and additional faculty are becoming involved monthly. The bredth of this interest can be seen from the list of faculty, and their departments, affiliated with NYCCS.

COURSES: Students with computational science INTERESTS will take courses in his/her own department and pass the exams in that department. But the essence of supercomputing is interdisciplinary, and NYCCS urges students with an interest in supercomputing to cross disciplinary boundaries in their selection of courses. To assist in this process, we have assembled a list(by department) of computationally related or relevant courses, with links to the course description.