Founded in 1985, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) enables international science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and 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, high-end 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 inter-disciplinary 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 primarily funded by NSF 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 operates powerful high-end computing resources including DataStar, a 15.6 teraflop IBM Power4+ supercomputer with total aggregate memory of 7.3 terabytes. DataStar is ranked among the top supercomputers in the world and is used for large-scale, data-intensive scientific research applications. In addition, SDSC was the first academic institution to install an IBM BG/L eServer, named BlueGene Data (or Intimidata by SDSC staff), which now provides 17.2 teraflops of compute power.
SDSC also 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 a 4.4-teraflop IA 64 Linux cluster, 1.4 petabytes of online disk storage with more than 25 petabytes of archival storage, 220 terabytes of General Parallel File System mounted across the TeraGrid and is connected to the other national TeraGrid partners by a 20-Gbps cross-country backbone.
SDSC is led by Dr. Francine Berman. A pioneer in grid computing and a leader in the national effort to build a comprehensive modern cyberinfrastructure, Dr. Berman's vision for SDSC is to provide a comprehensive set of tools scientists and engineers can use to reach their goals faster and more efficiently.
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 astro-physics 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.
