Computer speeds have increased by a factor of more than 1 billion over the last 50 years, but that pace is not guaranteed to continue. Moore’s Law—the observation that microchip components double every 18 months—is not a fundamental law of nature. Sustaining progress requires new materials and better ways to control their properties. This Centre for Doctoral Training will train students to develop the software that can make that happen. For every tenfold hardware speed gain, improved software has historically delivered a further hundredfold performance increase. The students will learn numerical methods and modern software development techniques to create tools that can design new materials and simulate complex processes inside them. If successful, the centre will help maintain the UK’s lead in both software and hardware, which has been a strength since the earliest programmable computers. The impact will be felt across the technologies that depend on faster, more efficient computing—from smartphones and portable electronics to the internet itself. This is a strategic investment in the people who will write the code that keeps computational progress alive.
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Moore's Law states that the number of active components on an microchip doubles every 18 months. Variants of this Law can be applied to many measures of computer performance, such as memory and hard disk capacity, and to reductions in the cost of computations. Remarkably, Moore's Law has applied for over 50 years during which time computer speeds have increased by a factor of more than 1 billion! This remarkable rise of computational power has affected all of our lives in profound ways, through the widespread usage of computers, the internet and portable electronic devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Unfortunately, Moore's Law is not a fundamental law of nature, and sustaining this extraordinary rate of progress requires continuous hard work and investment in new technologies most of which relate to advances in our understanding and ability to control the properties of materials. Computer software plays an important role in enhancing computational performance and in many cases it has been found that for every factor of 10 increase in computational performance achieved by faster hardware, improved software has further increased computational performance by a factor of 100. Furthermore, improved software is also essential for extending the range of physical properties and processes which can be studied computationally. Our EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Computational Methods for Materials Science aims to provide training in numerical methods and modern software development techniques so that the students in the CDT are capable of developing innovative new software which can be used, for instance, to help design new materials and understand the complex processes that occur in materials. The UK, and in particular Cambridge, has been a pioneer in both software and hardware since the earliest programmable computers, and through this strategic investment we aim to ensure that this lead is sustained well into the future.
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