About IDRE

The Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) is a cooperative of faculty and technologists working to advance the existing body of computing knowledge and expertise at UCLA. IDRE supports research and innovative scholarship that takes advantage of new technologies, and encourages collaboration between faculty from different departments and disciplines at UCLA, the opening of new research questions, and the enrichment of the learning environment. The goal of this campus-wide collective is to make UCLA a world leader in high-performance computing and visualization research and education.

To best address the needs of the campus, IDRE has identified three core areas of research: High-Performance Computing (IDRE-HPC); Humanities, Arts and Architecture, Social and Information Sciences (IDRE-HASIS); and Statistical Computing (IDRE-STATS). Each of these three core areas target specific UCLA faculty research agendas, each supports digital research and education central to its specific mission, and each provides access to resources tailored to the research questions of its faculty constituents.

Welcome Letter from Warren Mori, IDRE's director

UCLA has many strong, world-class individual research group efforts in scientific computing, in medical imaging, and in data analysis of laboratory experiments. These efforts involve researchers across the professional schools and the College. However, few individuals and groups possess all of the requisite collection of skills to function optimally in computational science. Success requires engaged interdisciplinary teams working together in a focused environment supported by a robust technical infrastructure. IDRE was created to be a convergence point for this interdisciplinary expertise, charged with the task of identifying perspectives and methodologies in mathematics, engineering, computer science, statistics, and the domain sciences that can yield a unified approach to computation and visualization.

Specifically, IDRE will:

• Be a catalyst for faculty across departments and schools to form teams focused on solving scientific problems of national significance
• Establish innovative new models that will provide the unique technical foundation required for computational science and engineering research by building bridges across research disciplines
• Provide a strong intellectual environment for faculty, researchers, and students through international workshops, seminar series, and conferences
• Provide a facility for code sharing, development, and maintenance
• Build up computational resources through networked local clusters and central computing facilities as well as better access to national high-end computational platforms
• Develop and coordinate curriculum across UCLA in the areas of computation and simulation