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\title{Preface}

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Alongside theory and experiment, simulation is today considered equally 
as a fundamental means for scientific investigation. Materials science is a 
field where computational methods have found particularly widespread
application.

There is a wealth of reports in the scientific literature presenting 
the results of computational material science studies, but the actual 
machinery used to perform these calculations is much less well documented.
Against this backdrop, the {\em Software Development for Process and Materials
Design\/} symposium was held in Moscow on September 15-16, 2002 as a  
satellite symposium to the {\em Nano and Giga Challenges in
Microelectronics\/} meeting. The focus of the symposium was to introduce 
and discuss software tools used to explore questions related to materials
science and technology development, with an emphasis on detailing
the algorithms and software tools used to accomplish the calculations.
We will continue these important exchanges with the {\em US-Russian
Workshop on Software Development to Bridge Atomic and Macroscopic
Scales for Materials, Process, and Device Design \/} to be held
at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, November 13-15, 2003. 

To capture the latest advances in software technology 
we present this special issue which have enabled
the remarkable achievements of computational materials science
in recent years. It is our hope that this special issue
will simultaneously serve as an overview 
to the types of computer tools currently being developed and applied within the
field of computational materials science, and to provide detailed information 
to readers on specific implementions across a wide range of problems.
Papers in this volume cover important software categories:
atomic scale simulation; materials structure, chemistry, and thermodynamics,
electronic structure computation, nanotechnology, and graphical and
informatics approaches in materials design. 

We would like to thank our co-organizers, Boris V. Potapkin
(Russian Research Center {\em Kurchatov Institute} in Moscow),
staff of the Motorola in Moscow, and Maria Oseeva (SarovLabs, Sarov)
without whom the meeting would not have run so smoothly, nor have achieved
the level of success accomplished.

The Moscow {\em Software Development\/} meeting would have 
not been possible without our sponsors, who all generously supported
the meeting. For their support, we would like to extend our gratitude to:
Nuclear Cities Initiative, Nuclear Threat Initiative, European 
Office of Aerospace Research and Development of US Air Force, FQS Poland,
Digital DNA Lab Motorola, Phantoms Nanotechnology Network,
and the Ohio Supercomputing Center. 

\noindent\begin{tabular}{ccc}
Jim Greer\ \ \ \ \  & \ \ \ \ \ Anatoli Korkin\ \ \ \ \  & \ \ \ \ \ Jan Labanowski\\
NMRC & Motorola  & Ohio Supercomputer Center \\
{\small Cork, Ireland} & {\small Phoenix, AZ, USA} & {\small Columbus, Ohio}\\
\end{tabular}
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\noindent June, 2003

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