The Institute for Digital Research and Education, together with the Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering, was awarded a five year $4,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create the Particle-in-Cell and Kinetic Simulation Software Center (PICKSC) at UCLA. The PI is Professor Warren Mori and co-PIs are Prof. R. Caflisch and Drs. Decyk and Tsung. The Center will aim to significantly broaden the impact of PIC simulations by making available and documenting illustrative software programs for different computing hardware, a flexible Framework for rapid construction of parallelized PIC programs, and several distinct production programs. It will also include activities on developing and comparing different PIC algorithms and documenting best practices for developing and using PIC programs. The Center will bring together an interdisciplinary team of faculty, research staff, post-doctoral scholars, and graduate students. The Center will also develop additional educational software for undergraduate and graduate courses in plasma physics and computer science. It will also work to build a large community of users through outreach and an annual workshop.