San Diego Supercomputer Center Opens New BlockLAB Research Laboratory

Published September 25, 2018

James Short, BlockLAB's director and SDSC’s lead scientist at CLDS.  Credit: Ben Tolo, SDSC/UC San Diego.

The Center for Large Scale Data Systems (CLDS) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, formally opened a new blockchain research laboratory with the objectives of exploring the principal technologies and business use cases in blockchains, distributed ledgers, digital transactions, and smart contracts.

Founded in partnership with technology firms AEEC, Collibra, Dell Technologies, IBM, and Intel, the new laboratory, called BlockLAB, will conduct primary research in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and their potential business applications across a wide range of industrial and organizational settings.

“There is much interest and experimentation underway in evaluating blockchain technologies and their applications in industry and government,” said James Short, BlockLAB's director and SDSC’s lead scientist at CLDS. “One of our primary goals is to work closely with industry partners to provide foundational knowledge to help science-based and industrial companies evaluate the potential benefits and risks of applying these new technologies to critical, large-scale transaction and data-intensive business processes.”

A blockchain is a public register in which information exchanges between users in the same network are stored in a secure, verifiable, and permanent manner. All transaction data is stored in a chain of connected, cryptographic blocks, hence the name.  

Details of BlockLAB's research program and events this year can be obtained online at https://www.clds.info/blocklab.html.  BlockLAB's 2018 summary of research progress will be presented at SDSC's annual Data West technology conference December 5-6 at SDSC. More information is at www.datawest.org.

About SDSC

As an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, SDSC is considered a leader in data-intensive computing and cyberinfrastructure, providing resources, services, and expertise to the national research community, including industry and academia. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible, integrated network of computer-based resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. SDSC’s petascale Comet supercomputer is a key resource within the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program.