San Diego Supercomputer Center

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.

The Signaling Gateway Resource Servers are housed at SDSC and served 24/7 to the larger research community. SDSC and Nature Publishing Group are also jointly exploring ways to serve large biological data sets and information content to the community.

To find out more about SDSC please visit http://www.sdsc.edu.

SDSC Staff

Shankar Subramaniam UCSD: Director, Signaling Gateway Project
Shankar Subramaniam is a Professor of Bioengineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biology and Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the University of California at San Diego. He also has adjunct Professorships at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Brian Saunders Project Coordinator and Bioinformatics Specialist, Signaling Gateway Project
Brian Saunders has been in the bioinformatics field since 1997 and with the San Diego Supercomputer Center since 1999. He has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Stephen Lyon Webmaster and Application Programmer, Signaling Gateway Project
Stephen Lyon has been a programmer since 1990 working at various companies including Intuit and Thomson Scientific, and has been with the San Diego Supercomputer Center since 2002. He has a B.A. in Visual Arts (Studio) from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A. in Mathematics from California State University, Fullerton.

Signaling Gateway is partially funded by a NIH, NIGMS grant #1 R01 GM078005-01 to UC San Diego (PI: Shankar Subramaniam)