Fledgling programs exist at Caltech, Cornell, Clemson, Denver, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Syracuse, and U.C. Davis. These programs are diverse, and no national consensus as to the core knowledge of computational science has been developed. The NSF Supercomputer Centers at Cornell, Illinois, Pittsburgh, and San Diego have played a major role in enhancing the visibility and progress of computational science. However, these centers are set up outside of the academic framework of universities and do not contribute directly to developing computational science as an academic area. These centers, industry, the National laboratories, and indeed the federal government with its new high-performance computing and communication initiative, are all driving computational science forward.
Academia is behind.
Not only are there few computational science education programs, but few faculty who could teach such a curriculum. The poor job opportunities for computationalists in leading universities naturally discourages students entering the field and so again hinders the development of new educational programs. It will not be an easy issue to address, and probably only slow progress will be made as computational science gradually gains recognition in universities as a fundamentally exciting field. The inevitable dominance of parallel computing will help, as will the use of parallel computers in the NSF centers that have provided such a critical stimulus for computational science. Industry and the National laboratories already offer computational scientists excellent job opportunities, and the demand for such training will grow.