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Above is the Computer Building located on Bigler Street at Penn State University Park. The Computer Building houses the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS). CREDIT: Suzy Unger, ICDS project coordinator

ICDS enables interdisciplinary, computational research

Posted on July 1, 2025

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), known for managing Penn State’s Roar supercomputer, is focused on fostering interdisciplinary, computationally intensive research and scientific collaborations.

Beginning with only 13 co-hires at inception, ICDS now brings together 47 co-hires across 10 colleges covering diverse domains, enabling fundamental research. 

According to Ruth Weber, associate vice president for research operations, support for a computational science institute started approximately 2007 with founding director, Dr. Padma Raghavan, who was a faculty member in the College of Engineering. 

In 2011, Raghavan and Peter Hudson, then director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, co-chaired an intra-university task force tasked with developing a strategic vision for high-performance computing (HPC) at Penn State. 

The vision, Raghavan said, called for promoting computationally enabled, cross-disciplinary research spanning the College of Enginering, Eberly College of Science and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.  

“The focus was on advancing scientific discovery and engineering design through computational simulations of physics-based models for predicting earthquakes, designing semiconductor materials, or determining if aerospace systems could withstand high turbulence,” Raghavan said. “The high-fidelity numerical solutions of such models are computationally intensive, so that’s where supercomputing came in. Without HPC, such modeling would be prohibitively slow, thus limiting scientific progress.” 

The long-term need for an institute was much more expansive, Raghavan said.  

“It was clear to me and many others that we needed a much more expansive vision for its long-term development,” Raghavan said. “The digital revolution was well on its way with rapidly expanding scientific datasets and Moore’s law-driven doubling of Computer Processing Units (CPU) peak processing rates every 18 months. It was clear that almost all disciplines across the entire University were ripe for computing and data-enabled breakthroughs.” 

Penn State’s research mission focused on creating new knowledge and finding solutions, Raghavan added.  

By doing that and creating environments for communities to “translate data into knowledge and knowledge into solutions, the institute could drive those advances across the University as a peer to the already-existing research institutes at Penn State including the Huck Institutes, the Materials Research Institute, the Social Science Research Institute, and the Institute for Energy and the Environment,” Raghavan said. 

The task force’s recommendation was to establish a University-wide institute, named the Penn State Institute for CyberScience (ICS). The institute was formally established in 2012 through the then Office of the Vice President for Research. 

This initial leadership team at ICS brought together 13 faculty co-hires from 22 departments within the Eberly College of Science, the College of Engineering, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the College of Health and Human Development, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, and the College of the Liberal Arts. 

ICDS Interim Director Guido Cervone, was part of the first cohort. 

“I came to Penn State because of ICDS,” Cervone said. “My research, by nature, is interdisciplinary. I didn’t feel a perfect match with any particular department. The institute gave me an opportunity to collaborate with colleagues on topics that are not normally considered central in my direct field of study.” 

It was in 2014 that the ICS team with Raghavan at the helm, as well as Penn State Executive Vice President and Provost Nick Jones and Vice President for Research Neil Sharkey, started to develop the HPC and data facilities. 

“Working with a faculty coordinating committee, we were able to re-engineer the existing infrastructure from Information Technology and put in place a cost-effective model to deploy a campus-wide ‘cloud’ with capabilities that can grow and evolve to meet researcher needs,” Raghavan said. 

The infrastructure was named ICS-ACI (Advanced Cyber Infrastructure).  

Currently, the institute has thousands of researchers and students that use the Roar supercomputing facility to enable and accelerate their research. The institute also supports Penn State researchers through the Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) team who help with HPC trainings, optimizing and maintaining workflows and other project support. 

“I started in the initial cohort of co-hires in May 2014,” said Christelle Wauthier, associate director and associate professor of geosciences. “Through the institute I was able to find community and research collaborators. I met Guido in this cohort and together, we wrote proposals, worked on machine learning projects, mentored postdocs and wrote papers.” 

Ed O’Brien, co-hire and professor of chemistry in the Eberly College of Science, echoed that sentiment. 

“ICDS has enabled my research through the professional network of co-hires and the mentorship from senior co-hires only made possible through ICDS,” he said. “Without that mentorship, and the help of the RISE team, I would not have gone after large center grants.” 

Through ICDS, O’Brien was able to secure a $20M U.S. National Science Foundation grant for the NSF National Synthesis Center for Molecular and Cellular Sciences at Penn State (NCEMS).  

In 2016, the late Dr. Jenni Evans, professor emerita of meteorology and atmospheric science, was appointed interim director, and was later named the director in 2017. 

It was under Evans’ leadership that ICS was renamed to the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) to be more aligned with the research community. ICDS grew significantly at this time, attracting co-hires from new colleges and departments, according to Cervone.

Evans was also instrumental in expanding and naming the Roar supercomputing system as well as bringing in well over 30 new co-hires to the institute. The supercomputer served the research needs of thousands of faculty members, students and staff at Penn State, and was central to securing millions of dollars in external research funds. She retired from ICDS in 2024. 

ICDS-enabled science and research have only continued to flourish under Cervone, who started as interim director in 2024. 

Under his leadership, Cervone’s main goals have been to invest more in enhancing ICDS research by focusing on computational research hubs in main interest areas: artificial intelligence, which started under Dr. Evans, digital twins, and quantum, data and computational sciences. 

“We created this tight network of co-hires, and we want to continue to enhance that community and research in general,” Cervone said. “Supercomputing is necessary for our research, but it is the research of our faculty, staff and students that makes us unique. We are pushing the boundaries across disciplines. We speak the same computational language, but we use it in different ways.” 

Together, ICDS co-hires, leadership, RISE engineers and core facilities, have made a positive impact through published research articles, standing up research centers, and leading panels, seminars and conferences. 

“I have been pleased to see that ICDS leadership has grown from the various initiatives and with each iteration, ICDS is becoming more impactful in research at Penn State,” O’Brien said. “Data science is the future of most scientific advances because the growth of data acquisition is growing exponentially. There is more data than ever, and that is going to lead to ever-growing discoveries. ICDS is perfectly suited to help with that evolution.” 

ICDS also houses the Center for Immersive Experiences, which offers immersive technologies, knowledge and skills to the Penn State Community to advance science; the Center for Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Industry, which connects industry members with Penn State AI and ML experts; and the Penn State AI Hub, which seeks to promote, inform and organize research, education and outreach at Penn State. 

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