San Diego Supercomputer Center
As an Organized Research Unit of the University of California, San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is considered a leader in advanced computation and all aspects of “Big Data,” which includes data integration and storage, performance modeling, data mining and predictive analytics, software development, and more. SDSC provides resources, services, and expertise to the national research community including academia, industry, and government.
SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from astrophysics and bioinformatics to environmental sciences and health IT. SDSC was founded in 1985 with a $170 million grant from the 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.
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 286,000 visitors per month from about 190 countries to the Protein Data Bank, or performing large-scale, award-winning simulations of the origin of the universe or how a major earthquake would affect densely populated areas such as Southern California.
SDSC is a partner in XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), an NSF program that comprises the most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. SDSC has also pioneered advances in data storage and cloud computing, and now houses several “centers of excellence” in the areas of large-scale data management, predictive analytics, health IT services, workflow automation, and Internet analysis.
In the fall of 2020, SDSC launched its newest National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded supercomputer, Expanse. At over twice the performance of SDSC’s Comet system, Expanse supports SDSC's vision of 'Computing without Boundaries' by increasing the capacity and performance for thousands of users of batch-oriented and science gateway computing.