Abstract: U.S. President Obama introduced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and clearly stated that the goal of MGI is “to discover, develop, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials at twice the speed than is possible today.” The pertinent whitepaper “Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness” released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in June 2011 outlines the Materials Innovation Infrastructure as consisting of three platforms: computational tools, experimental tools and digital data. The MGI will accelerate materials design and deployment by: ①developing effective and reliable computational methods and software tools, ②developing high-throughput experimental methodologies to validate theories and to provide reliable
experimental data to the materials databases, and ③establishing reliable and widely applicable databases and materials informatics tools. The ultimate intent of MGI is to usher in a new paradigm/culture of materials research and innovation where materials design is conducted by up-front simulations/predictions followed by key validation experiments in contrast to the current practice that is heavily based on experimental iterations and experiences.

Key words: The Materials Genome Initiative, materials design, integrated computational materials engineering (ICME)