SNSF awards NCCR MARVEL a second tranche of 18 Million CHF

In its report, the SNSF Research Council praised MARVEL’s scientific excellence and performance, national networking, cooperation and structural achievements.

“The Scientific Advisory Board continues to be highly impressed and inspired by the results obtained in MARVEL,” said Professor Giulia Galli of the University of Chicago, Chair of MARVEL’s Scientific Advisory Board. “With the presence of a critical mass of world-leading researchers in the Centre, it is exceptionally well positioned to advance computational materials science and to discover technologically transformative materials.”

The funding will allow MARVEL to build on the work done in Phase 1 uniting a group of outstanding computational scientists towards the goals of materials design and discovery. In Phase 2, MARVEL will leverage this community - and the convergence of simulations, data and experiments - to dedicate itself to six ambitious Design-and-Discovery projects, complemented by two Incubator projects and the structural efforts of its “Open Science” and “HPC and Future Architectures” platforms.  

The Design-and-Discovery projects address outstanding scientific problems that have promising technological implications for the high-tech, high-value industrial landscape of Switzerland, or more broadly in energy, pharma, and ICT. Phase 2 will initially focus on organic crystals, complex metal alloys, nanomaterials, metal-organic frameworks, correlated oxides, and topological materials, complemented by Incubator efforts on solid-state ionic conductors and machine learning. More information can be found here. 

The continued development of the Open Science platform – powered by the AiiDA materials’ informatics framework (http://aiida.net) and the Materials Cloud portal (http://materialscloud.org) – will allow the broader scientific community to compute on-demand complex material properties, leading the way to tailored solutions and the establishment in the third phase of a user facility to explore and leverage materials’ space. 

Collaborations between all PIs and projects are greatly enhanced by the HPC and Future Architectures platform that co-develops the software and hardware ecosystem at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, hosting the largest supercomputer in Europe (5^th in the world). 

Finally, MARVEL has also established close synergies with major European initiatives, most notably in its partnership with the H2020 MaX Centre of Excellence for e-Infrastructure, dedicated to materials, and the H2020 projects European Materials Modelling Council, MarketPlace, and Nanoscience Foundries and Fine Analysis.