These Web pages have been designed to enhance research collaboration and educate students about mechanistic models that span length scales from discrete atomistic nanostructures to the continuous macrostructures. Spanning length scales from nanostructures to microstructures and continuous macrostructures is a popular research topic in the materials research community. The models posted here reflect the experience of the professors who created these CRCD Web pages.

• Dr. Diana Farkas, Department of Material Science and Engineering (MSE), is a researcher who studies mechanical behavior of nanostructures. Diana is also the director of the Center for Modeling and Simulation in Material Science.
• Dr. Ronald D. Kriz, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM), studies mechanical behavior of laminated composite structures and wave propagation in anisotropic continuous media. Ron is the founder and director of the Laboratory for Scientific Visual Analysis (LSVA) and the CAVE.
• Dr. Romesh C. Batra, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, studies mechanical behavior of continuous media and constitutive theory.

The use of supercomputing simulations has become a popular and necessary tool for materials researchers. With Java and Web technology it is possible to go beyond the dissemination of computer code on the Web. Here we have created an interactive Java-Web based server that allows researchers and educators to collaborate by setting up sample code that can be submitted to a network of distributed resources where both fellow researchers and students can exchange and learn about each others mechanistic and numerical models. In this sense there is little difference between a researcher and a student.

The National Science Foundation supported the creation of this Combined Research and Curriculum Development (CRCD) project (Proposal) (NSF Grant EEC-9700815) which included the collaboration with computer software and hardware companies. In this effort we have collaborated with Visual Numerics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. Our collaborative interactive tools are based on Sun's Java and Visual Numerics' PV-Wave, JWave, and IMSL. Under a Sun Microsystems Educational Grant (Proposal), 8-Sun Sparc-20s were donated to create the Scientific Modeling and Visualization Classroom (SMVC) which was used by students in both CRCD classes. An overview of how we have worked with commercial vendors is summarized in Ref.[3] / (pdf).