  The recent decades have seen various attempts at accelerating the process of
developing materials targeted towards specific applications. The performance
required for a particular application leads to the choice of a particular
material system whose properties are optimized by manipulating its underlying
microstructure through processing. The specific configuration of the structure
is then designed by characterizing the material in detail, and using this
characterization along with physical principles in system level simulations and
optimization. These have been advanced by multiscale modeling of materials,
high-throughput experimentations, materials data-bases, topology optimization
and other ideas. Still, developing materials for extreme applications involving
large deformation, high strain rates and high temperatures remains a challenge.
This article reviews a number of recent methods that advance the goal of
designing materials targeted by specific applications.
