The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Physically, SDSC is located on the east end of Eleanor Roosevelt College on the campus of UCSD.
Founded in 1985, its self-prescribed mission is "developing and using technology to advance science". SDSC is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and pursues research in the areas of high performance computing, grid computing, computational biology, geoinformatics, computational physics, computational chemistry, data management, scientific visualization, and computer networking. SDSC is internationally recognized for its contribution to computational biosciences and computational approaches to earth sciences and genomics. SDSC is especially known for its role in the creation and maintenance of the Protein Data Bank, the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Cyberinfrastructure Center (NEESit), cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences (GEON), and the Tree of Life Project (TOL) .
SDSC is one of the four original sites involved in the TeraGrid project along with National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Argonne National Laboratory, and Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR).
SDSC developed the Rocks cluster computing environment, and is a pioneer in data management software development, including the storage resource broker (SRB).
Currently, the director of SDSC is Dr. Michael L. Norman, a distinguished professor of physics at UCSD and a globally recognized astrophysicist who succeeds Dr. Francine Berman, a noted pioneer in grid computing. He was named director in September 2010, having been the interim director for more than a year.
SDSC is home to the Performance Modeling and Characterization (PMaC) laboratory, whose mission is to bring scientific rigor to the prediction and understanding of factors affecting the performance of current and projected High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. PMaC is funded by the Department of Energy (SciDac PERC research grant), the Department of Defense (Navy DSRC PET program), DARPA, and the National Science Foundation. Allan E. Snavely, Ph.D., founded the PMaC laboratory in 2001.
In 2009 a combined team from SDSC and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs led by Allan Snavely won the prestigious Data Challenge competition held in Portland Oregon, at SC09, the annual premier conference in High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis for their design of a new kind of supercomputer that makes extensive use of flash memory and nicknamed "Dash". Dash is a prototype for a much larger system nicknamed "Gordon" that the team will deploy at SDSC in 2011 with more than 256 TB of flash memory.
SDSC is also home to the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (caida), and the Computational and Applied Statistics Laboratory (CASL).
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