What is the San Diego Supercomputer Center?

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) was formed to provide computational resources to scientists who need to use large and fast computers to conduct their research. These resources include not only some of the fastest supercomputers in the nation but also a staff of more than 450 scientists, software developers, and support personnel. Founded in 1985 and primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), SDSC is on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. SDSC is an international leader in data management, biosciences, geosciences, grid computing and visualization.

Visit the San Diego Supercomputer Center's website to learn more.

What are Supercomputers?

Supercomputer is just a term for the largest, fastest equipment available at any given time. Because there are constant advances in the speed of arithmetic processors and the size of memory, the idea of a supercomputer is very fluid. Although desktop computers and supercomputers are both equipped with similar processors, it's their speed and memory sizes that make them significantly different. For instance, a desktop computer in the year 2000 normally had a hard disk data capacity that ranged from 2 to 20 gigabytes and one processor with tens of megabytes of RAM (random access memory) - just enough to perform tasks such as word processing, web browsing, and video gaming. Meanwhile, a supercomputer may have thousands of processors, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and hard drives that allow for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of gigabytes of storage space.

Supercomputers are very, very fast. They can only add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but they can do that at a rate of many billions of calculations per second. The DataStar machine does 7 trillion calculations in a single second. It can do all the arithmetic Galileo did in his entire lifetime in about five minutes flat, with fewer errors. The supercomputer's large number of processors, enormous disk storage, and substantial memory greatly increases the power and speed of the machine. While today's desktop computers can perform millions of floating-point operations per second (megaflops), supercomputers can perform at speeds of billions of operations per second (called gigaflops) and trillions of operations per second (called teraflops). To learn more about SDSC's High Performance computers see: SDSC's High Perfomance Computing Resources.

Who uses Supercomputers?

There is a whole lot more to the San Diego Supercomputer Center than powerful computers! The San Diego Supercomputer Center has a staff of over 400 scientists, software developers, and support personnel, SDSC is an international leader in data management, biosciences, geosciences, grid computing, and visualization with expertise in computational science research and the development and integration of high-performance computing technologies.

* Scientific staff specializes in biology, biomedicine, bioinformatics, chemistry, and environmental sciences.

* Technology researchers focus on scalable parallel and distributed computing, data-intensive computing, applied network research, scientific visualization, and security.

* Support staff develops and maintains systems and application software, provides researcher and operations support, conducts training, develops user documentation, and publishes information about current projects.