Commission on Computational Physics (C20) - Report 2003

Activity Report of C20 Commission

1. IUPAP Sponsored Conferences

The Joint conference of ICCP6&CCP2003 was held in Beijing, China from 24 to 28 of May this year which was originally scheduled last year but was postponed because of the SARS crisis. This was the first joint conference of the CCP series with a computational physics conference in the Asia and Pacific region and was a good opportunity for the attendees to exchange their interests and computational technologies.

CCP2004 was held in Genova, Italy from 1 to 4 of September, which was very successfully organized. The organizers of CCP2004 had a concern at the beginning that CCP2004 would be influenced by the postponement of the ICCP6&CCP2003 joint conference, which fortunately tuned out to be just a concern.

2. Recommendation of CCP2005 for IUPAP Sponsorship

The application of CCP2005 that is scheduled from March 19 to 25 in Los Angels, was reviewed by the C20 commission members on e-mail basis. The 10 commission members out of 13 supported the conference. In consequence of this strong supports from the members, the C20 Commission sent a recommendation letter of CCP2005 to Prof. Barber on August 20 by e-mail.

3. C20 Commission Meeting

The C20 commission meeting was held during CCP2004, having the attendees of the six members and one associate. The issues discussed were 1) a review of the minutes of the previous meetings, 2) turning point in the activity of C20, 3) education and computational physics in third world countries, 4) updating of the C20 web page, 5) International Year of Physics 2005, 6) the teaching of computational physics to women, 7) preparation for 2005 General Assembly, 8) prize for graduate students, 9) list of associate members for C20, 10) possible venues for CCP2006. The major parts of the discussion time were spent for the subjects of 2), 3) and 4). Our main conclusions are:

1) It is agreed the main justification of the activities of C-20 comes from joint interests to push computational methods and computing technology in the study of complex phenomena like climate modeling, earth science, nanoscience , etc…

2) It was decided that the C20 commission would contact the IUPAP council in order to propose a plan for the computational physics education in the developing countries in conjunction with WYP2005.

3) Prof. Drummond, the representative of Australia, volunteered to take responsibility for the website maintenance and hosting, for one year, starting in 2005.

The minutes of the meeting will be circulated soon.