It all started when a group of researchers at UPMC realized that they were facing similar challenges because they were all using high-performance computing. Instead of trying to solve these problems in their separate labs, they decided to come together to discuss interdisciplinary research with HPC resources.
What began as an informal work group soon became an institute where researchers from different disciplines could come together to share their expertise in order to solve complex problems with the help of large scale computation, data analysis and scientific visualisation. Research in fields like chemistry, physics, biology, medicine and the humanities led in turn to new developments in mathematics and informatics.
The institute is determined to foster this type of research because we know it will become increasingly common in the comming years as we try to solve multidimensional problems. As the proverb says: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.