During July 6-10, 2014, the 2014 (7th) International Symposium on Multi-scale Modelling and Simulation of Materials (ISMMSM) was held successively in ISSP, CAS. This symposium was organized by the Computational Materials Science Branch of the Chinese Materials Research Society and was hosted by ISSP. Prof. ZhiZengfrom ISSP was theconference chairman. And the ISSP leader, Prof. Wei-Ping Cai gave a welcoming speech.
Amounts of top-level researchers in the world were invited to present their start-of-art works in the computational materials sciences. Especially, from bothof the two pioneering groups in the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for the global structure optimization/prediction, Prof. Cai-Zhuang Wang (Ames Laboratory, US-DOE) and Prof.Artem R. Oganov (State University of New York at Stony Brook), presented their exciting talks about the adaptive GAmethod/software and USPEX software, respectively. The powerful ability and ample achievements of GA methods much absorbed the attentions of conference attendees. In addition, some selected works on structure prediction and exploration were given by the other distinguished researchers, such as Prof. Su-HuaiWei (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, US-DOE)on the design of oxide materials for energy applications, Prof. Zhi-Pan Liu (Fudan University) on the stochastic surface walking method for structure prediction and pathway searching, Prof. Ji-Jun Zhao (Dalian University of Technology) on the structural exploration of atomic/molecular clusters etc. . As for one of the hot fieldsin material sciences, the two-dimensional materials like 2D organic topological insulators, few-layer black phosphorus, WSe2 and graphene etc., their current research status and applications were introduced and reviewed by Prof. Feng Liu (Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Utah), Prof. Wei Ji (Renmin University of China), Dr. Lei Liu (NanoAcademic Technologies Inc. Canada) ,Prof. Yu-FengGuo (Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and Prof. Xiao-Jun Wu (University of Science and Technology of China). Other topics were also presented in the conference, e.g.the simple fluids at extreme conditions by Prof. SandroScandolo (International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy), and the strong correlation systems by Prof. Pei-Hong Zhang (university at Buffalo, State University of New York) and Prof. Hua Wu (FudanUniversity) and Prof. Xing-Qiang Shi (South University of Science and Technology of China). Finally, Profs. Yong-Sheng Zhang and Xiao-Hong Zheng from ISSP gave their works on Hydrogen storage and GPU acceleration technique, respectively.
In the poster section, a wide research field was coveredincluding the methodology, algorithm, softwareand applications of material simulation. Students expressed their works and discussed with interested participants. According to the vote of the conference committee, 5 outstanding posters were awarded.
In the last two days of the conference，a hands-on training on Adaptive GA was organized by Prof. Cai-Zhuang Wang and his assistants. More than 130 scientists and students took part in the training. At the end, the chairman Prof. ZhiZengencouraged young scientists and studentsto devote themselves to the development of GA methodology and achieve fruitful research works.