| 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
led by 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 a 5.7 teraflop IBM Blue
Gene eServer, named Intimidata.
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 6 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 40-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.
Not only does SDSC offer more than 26 teraflops of
computing power for its users, it also has 1.4 petabytes
of online disk storage and more than 6 petabytes or
archival tape storage, which will be doubled over the
next year.
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 helpdesk services, portal development
and a variety of other services.
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