A High Performance Computational Research Community

The Institute for Computational and Data Sciences is one of eight interdisciplinary research institutes within Penn State’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research. ICDS brings researchers together to develop and apply innovative, high performance computation methods. ICDS supports faculty from dozens of departments in nearly all of Penn State’s twenty-four campuses.

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Mission & Vision

Our Mission

ICDS seeks to advance Penn State science through computational and quantum theory, high-performance computing, Artificial Intelligence and data science, driving technological breakthroughs that redefine what is possible.

Our Vision

Our vision is to redefine the boundaries of discovery by unifying the digital and physical worlds, driving the next era of human progress advancing science at the intersection of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, massive datasets, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Penn State’s Computational and Data Sciences Research Community

ICDS enables and supports the diverse computational and data science research taking place throughout Penn State.

Seed Grants: ICDS offers seed grants periodically to launch new areas of research.

Co-Hires and Startup Packages: ICDS partners with many Penn State units to recruit talented computational and data scientists. Through the ICDS Co-Hire program, established in 2012, ICDS has jointly hired top-tier scientists in partnership with other Penn State campuses and academic colleges. Additionally, ICDS helps to support startup packages for other faculty members joining the Penn State ranks.

Cyberinfrastructure: ICDS operates and continues to expand a world-class high-performance computing system known as the Roar Collab supercomputer. This valuable resource lets Penn State researchers carry out advanced simulation and statistical modeling, data analysis, data mining, machine learning, and more.

With thousands of computational cores, and petabytes of storage, Roar Collab gives Penn State researchers access to the massive computing resources required by today’s computational and data intensive research.

The Roar Collab supercomputer is located in a data center operated by the Data Center Services unit of the Penn State Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

Multi-Institute Collaborations

Our work intersects with seven other Penn State institutes:

• The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
• The Materials Research Institute
• The Institutes of Energy and the Environment
• The Social Science Research Institute
• The Cancer Institute
• The Clinical and Translational Science Institute
• The Cocoziello Institute of Real Estate Innovation