Founded in 1985, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) enables international science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and data-intensive, high-performance computing.
Continuing this legacy into the era of cyberinfrastructure, SDSC is a strategic resource to science, industry and academia, offering leadership in the areas of data management, grid computing, bioinformatics, geoinformatics, data-intensive computing as well as other science and engineering disciplines. The mission of SDSC is to extend the reach of scientific accomplishments by providing tools such as high-performance hardware technologies, integrative software technologies, and deep interdisciplinary expertise to the community.
SDSC was founded with a $170 million grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Supercomputer Centers program. From 1997 to 2004, SDSC extended its leadership in computational science and engineering to form the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), teaming with approximately 40 university partners around the country. Today, SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego with a staff of talented scientists, software developers and support personnel.
Over the years, SDSC has served more than 10,000 researchers at 300 academic, government and industrial institutions in the United States and around the world. Today, these scientists and engineers increasingly rely on the availability of globally accessible data cyberinfrastructure tools to drive research and education. This focus on data cyberinfrastructure provides a broad and useful spectrum of integrated technologies to support increasingly complex, large-scale and cooperative scientific endeavors.
SDSC serves as the data-intensive site lead in the NSF-funded TeraGrid, a multiyear effort to build and deploy the world's first large-scale and production grid infrastructure for open scientific research. SDSC hosts the Triton Resource, an integrated, data-intensive compute system primarily designed to support UC San Diego and UC researchers. The Center also has launched "Dash," the first high-performance compute system to leverage super-sized "flash memory" to accelerate investigation of a wide range of data-intensive science problems.
SDSC is led by Dr. Michael Norman. Dr. Norman, named SDSC interim director in June 2009, is a distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego and a globally recognized astrophysicist. Dr. Norman is a pioneer in using advanced computational methods to explore the universe and its beginnings. In this capacity, he directed the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics -- a collaborative effort between UC San Diego and SDSC.
A broad community of scientists, engineers, students, commercial partners, museums and other facilities work with SDSC to develop cyberinfrastructure-enabled applications to help manage their extreme data needs. Projects run the gamut from creating astrophysics visualization for the American Museum of Natural History, to supporting more than 20,000 users per day to the Protein Data Bank, to performing large-scale simulations of the origin of the universe, to the creation of a national scale grid environment as part of NSF's TeraGrid.
Along with these data cyberinfrastructure tools, SDSC also offers users full-time support including code optimization, training, 24-hour help desk services, portal development and a variety of other services.
