News Archive

SDSC News Releases: 2005

  • NSF Awards $150 Million to Operate, Enhance the TeraGrid

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $150 million award to operate and enhance the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), also called TeraGrid. As one of the leading providers of TeraGrid resources, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) will receive more than $14 million of this award over a five year period.

    Published August 17, 2005

  • UCSD Named 'Hottest For Science' By Newsweek Guide

    The University of California, San Diego, long regarded as one of the nation's premier research universities, has been named the "hottest" institution in the country for students to study science by Newsweek and the 2006 Kaplan/Newsweek College Guide.

    Published August 16, 2005

  • The Big Picture: GEON Map Services

    Creating maps that are effective in communicating complex information takes considerable effort and skill, especially when the spatial data sets come in different formats, units, and projections, or reflect the diverse conventions used in different scientific domains. Finding a solution to these challenges becomes especially critical in large cyberinfrastructure projects such as the NSF-supported GEON project, "Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences," which is enabling the seamless integration of different scientific data sets in order to help geoscientists answer much broader questions across multiple disciplines than was previously possible.

    Published August 8, 2005

  • Academic Associates Program at SDSC Launches New Website

    The Academic Associates Program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has rolled out a new Website to provide improved service to University of California researchers who access SDSC resources under the program. "We've incorporated a number of good suggestions from users," said Subhashini Sivagnanam, Coordinator of the AAP at SDSC. "The new site will help researchers get the most out of large-scale SDSC resources."

    Published August 8, 2005

  • SDSC Launches Data Central

    Today, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) launched Data Central, the first program of its kind to support a number of large community data collections and databases. In addition to providing hosting and long-term archiving, Data Central will allow users to make their data collections publicly available to a wide community of potential users.

    Published August 1, 2005

  • On Perfect Storms, Competitiveness, and the "Gretzky Rule"

    Recent articles in community publications have focused on the critical need for capable high performance computing (HPC) resources for the open academic community. Compelling reports from the National Research Council, PITAC (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee), the National Science Board, and others point to our current diminished ability to provide adequate computational and data management support for U.S. researchers, and the impact of insufficient technology capacity and capability on the loss of U.S. competitiveness and leadership.

    Published July 29, 2005

  • 11th Annual Computing Institute for Scientists and Researchers Held at SDSC

    Thirty researchers and scientists attended the 11th Annual Computing Institute held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the campus of UC San Diego. Attendees included graduate students, scientists and researchers representing 17 institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The popular one-week training program, held from July 25-29, was designed to provide researchers with a solid introduction to the concepts and tools available in established and new technologies for the creation, manipulation, dissemination and analysis of large data sets.

    Published July 27, 2005

  • PSC holds special workshop for TeraGrid users

    <p>Cray and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center invite you to join them in Pittsburgh on August 9-12 for the Introduction to the Cray XT3 System. At this 4 day workshop, you will work with Cray specialists and PSC user consultants as well as interact with fellow users. Plenty of hands on time will be allotted to work on your own project.</p>

    Published July 26, 2005

  • Reagan Moore delivers Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series talk

    <p>The next Cyberinfrastructure Partner (CIP) Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series will feature a talk by Reagan Moore of San Diego Supercomputer Center on "Data Grids, Digital Libraries, and Persistent Archives: An Integrated Approach to Sharing, Publishing, and Archiving Data."</p> <p>It will be held Tuesday, August 2, 2005, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM (PDT, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (CDT) at the SDSC Auditorium.</p>

    Published July 26, 2005

  • NSF creates Office of Cyberinfrastructure

    In a statement to National Science Foundation employees, Director Arden Bement, Jr. today (July 22, 2005) announced that effective immediately the Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure at NSF has been renamed the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the reporting line has been changed from the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) to the Office of the Director.

    Published July 22, 2005

  • SDSC and NCSA Visualization Teams Collaborate to Create Work Selected for Planetarium Screening at DomeFest 2005 in July

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) today announced that a visualization jointly developed by the SDSC Visualization Team and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is among a select group of international submissions chosen by jury for screening during DomeFest 2005 at the LodeStar Astronomy Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Entitled "Evolution of the Universe: Galaxies Forming on Filamentary Structures", the visualization encapsulates our evolving universe, representing nearly 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present.

    Published July 20, 2005

  • Second Annual GEON Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists Held at SDSC

    Thirty-eight researchers attended the second annual GEON-hosted Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the campus of UC San Diego. The attendees included graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in geoscience and information technology from a number of agencies and more than 30 institutions in the U.S. and as far away as Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom. The popular one-week educational program, held from July 18-22, is designed to give geoscientists an "IT headstart" in using powerful new information technologies, or cyberinfrastructure, to enable a new generation of geoscience discoveries.

    Published July 20, 2005

  • SDSC Hosts Its First IBM Blue Gene Users Workshop

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) hosted its first Blue Gene Users Workshop on July 7 - 8, 2005. This workshop targeted researchers who could utilize the large number of processors on SDSC's newest supercomputer, which was installed late last year.

    Published July 12, 2005

  • SDSC Hosts Talk by P.K. Yeung on Large Turbulence Simulations

    Published July 8, 2005

  • SDSC Visualizations to be Featured at SIGGRAPH 2005

    A high-resolution, data-driven visualization showing the evolution of the universe created by a collaboration between the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will be viewed by thousands of people at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2005 conference. The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival has been called "the Academy Awards of computer graphics." Held July 31 through August 4 in Los Angeles, Calif., the annual conference and exhibition spotlights cutting-edge graphics and interactive technology and features the best in computer graphics from Hollywood, industry, academia, and independent artists.

    Published July 7, 2005

  • SDSC Among First World University Network Sites

    Virtual research collaboration is being taken to a new level with the creation of the very first international, interdisciplinary computer Grid. It has been established by the Worldwide Universities Network -- at five sites in three countries more than 5,000 miles apart.

    Published July 5, 2005

  • SDSC to Host 2nd International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences

    DILS 2005, the "2nd International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences," will be held July 20-22, 2005 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. The two-and-half day workshop will address issues in both research and practice in data management and integration in the life sciences. The workshop website with program and other information is at www.syncenter.org/dils2005/.

    Published June 22, 2005

  • CAIDA's Walrus Visualization Software Released as Open Source

    The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego has released as open source the Walrus software tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in 3-D space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, Walrus provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context.

    Published June 14, 2005

  • SDSC Group Supports International GLORIAD Network: Active Measurement Project Spots Internet Problems, Highlights Progress

    As the Information Age connects the world, researchers endeavor to understand and improve the performance of the networks that bridge continents, countries, and cultures. The Measurement and Network Analysis group of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR/MNA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego is playing an important role in an international project that is successfully linking scientists in the US, Canada, Russia, China, Korea, and the Netherlands with high speed network services.

    Published June 13, 2005

  • SDSC Hosts the 11th Annual Computing Institute for Scientists and Researchers

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has announced that it will host its 11th Annual Summer Institute July 25 - 29, 2005. Held at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the program will provide researchers with a solid introduction to the concepts and tools available in established and new technologies for the creation, manipulation, dissemination and analysis of large data sets.

    Published June 8, 2005

  • San Diego Supercomputer Center Launches the 2005 TeacherTECH Summer Computing Institute

    Published June 1, 2005

  • The Cyberinfrastructure Backplane: The Jump to Light Speed

    The second issue of Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch Quarterly is now available. In "The Cyberinfrastructure Backplane: The Jump to Light Speed," guest editors Larry Smarr of Calit2 and Phil Papadopoulos of the San Diego Supercomputer Center have assembled a collection of insightful articles that focus on the current state of large, operational research networks for the scientific and engineering community. With contributions from some of the most respected and widely known leaders in the field, this issue is designed provide an engaging look at what is being accomplished with fast optical networks today and where high performance network infrastructure will be going tomorrow.

    Published May 31, 2005

  • Forward-Looking Report Released: "Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Services"

    A comprehensive final report has been released from the National Science Foundation's workshop on "Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences" held in March 2005. The workshop brought together a gathering of social science and computer science leaders and thinkers to discuss in depth how the disciplines can work together to develop, deploy and use cyberinfrastructure - the coordinated hardware, software and human resources and information technologies required to enable modern science, engineering and societal applications integrated through the Internet and modern telecommunications.

    Published May 31, 2005

  • SDSC Shares in Best Student Paper Award for CVDB'05

    The Second International Workshop on Computer Vision meets Databases, CVDB 2005, has announced the awards for the this year's best student papers. The winning paper, "A Live Multimedia Stream Querying System," was by graduate student Bin Liu of the Georgia Institute of Technology, with coauthors Amarnath Gupta, director of the Advanced Query Processing Lab at SDSC, and professor Ramesh Jain of Georgia Tech University. Gupta and Jain are Bin's advisors.

    Published May 26, 2005

  • TeraGrid Systems Enable 14 Billion-Year Sky Survey With Highest Resolution to Date

    The TeraGrid announced today that the most highly defined spatial and temporal simulation of the universe was recently run on TeraGrid resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. Conducted by a research team of astrophysicists headed by Mike Norman of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the simulation was created using Enzo, a parallel, 3D cosmology hydrodynamics code. It took place during a 48-hour period and involved more than 10,000 CPU hours on SDSC's TeraGrid system.

    Published May 26, 2005

  • Rocks Team Helps UCSD Researchers Win Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuits Placement Contest By Providing Last-Minute Compute Power

    The team behind APlace, a large-scale placer software package used in the integrated-circuit design process, recently turned to the Rocks group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) for last-minute compute power so they could test and tune their software for a performance contest. The five-day contest, sponsored by IBM's Austin Research Lab and the International Symposium on Physical Design, was run on industrial designs with up to millions of placeable components, reflecting the design challenges of tomorrow's complex systems-on-chip.

    Published May 24, 2005

  • Rocks-A-Palooza Draws Users and Developers from Around the World

    The first annual Rocks Clusters Workshop "Rocks-A-Palooza" was held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on May 18 and 19, 2005. More than 90 people attended, with participants coming from Norway, Chile, Mexico, Singapore, Canada, as well as from across the United States to learn about and discuss all aspects of commodity clusters, the Rocks Cluster Distribution, and Rocks Roll development.

    Published May 23, 2005

  • SDSC in New Partnership to Build Next-Generation Site Survey Data Bank

    The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International (IODP-MI) is moving ahead with plans to turn the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Site Survey Data Bank (SSDB) into a fully electronic, Web-based, science information resource.

    Published May 18, 2005

  • SDSC Hosts Third Annual GEON Meeting

    More than 115 geoscientists and information technology researchers - double last year's attendance - representing over two dozen institutions gathered in San Diego on May 5-6 for the third annual meeting of the GEON "Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences" project. Combined with the project meeting, GEON sponsored a broader "National Meeting on Research Frontiers in Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences." The joint meeting, which included progress reports on the many components of GEON, demonstrations of new software, and presentations from experts in related fields, was held at the Bahia Resort Hotel on Mission Bay, and hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California, San Diego.

    Published May 17, 2005

  • Final Report: NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences

    The National Science Foundation funded the SBE/CISE Workshop on "Cyberinfrastructure for the Social and Behavioral Sciences" in recognition of NSF's role in enabling, promoting, and supporting science and engineering research and education. The workshop was intended to help identify the SBE sciences' needs for infrastructure, their potential for helping CISE develop this infrastructure for engineering and all the sciences, and their capacity for assessing the societal impacts of Cyberinfrastructure.

    Published May 17, 2005

  • Lipids get new comprehensive classification system

    In response to the growing number of lipids expected to be discovered through lipidomics and in anticipation of the massive amounts of data that will be generated by the lipid community, an international group of scientists has developed a comprehensive classification, nomenclature, and chemical representation system for lipids. The details of the system appear in the May issue of the <em> <em>Journal of Lipid Research</em> </em>, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.

    Published May 17, 2005

  • 2nd Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series Features Data Storage

    NCSA and SDSC are collaborating to integrate the NCSA HDF5 library and file format with the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB). HDF5 is widely used in the scientific community and the SRB is a powerful technology for collection management and distributed access, including access to HDF5 files. Cao, McGrath and Wan will discuss their collaboration.

    Published May 13, 2005

  • SDSC Boosts Data Capabilities

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California, San Diego recently added new on-line disk storage, offering 1.1 petabytes to users, complementing its 6+ petabytes of tape storage, 4.2 terabytes of DataStar supercomputer memory, and other data and storage capabilities. The addition will boost the resources provided to science and engineering users and will better support use of the over 70 community databases and data collections housed at SDSC.

    Published May 12, 2005

  • Library of Congress and National Science Foundation Announce Research Awards of $3 Million To Advance Digital Preservation

    The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Science Foundation today awarded eleven university teams a total of $3 million to undertake pioneering research to support the long-term management of digital information. These awards are the outcome of a partnership between the two agencies to develop the first digital-preservation research grants program.

    Published May 10, 2005

  • NIH Funds Next Generation Biology Workbench for Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Research at SDSC

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced today that it has received $2.2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide a cutting-edge, web-based research resource free of charge to biology researchers, educators and students nationwide. The effort, dubbed the Next Generation Biology Workbench, builds on the "Workbench" concept introduced more than a decade ago by SDSC researcher Dr. Shankar Subramaniam to provide broad access to many biology software tools and data resources through a single web-based interface.

    Published May 4, 2005

  • Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists

    This year's CSIG will be held July 18-22 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego. This week long, hands-on course will be designed to introduce geoscientists to commonly used and emergent information technology (IT) tools.

    Published May 3, 2005

  • National Science Foundation Strengthens Commitment to Education, Outreach, and Diversity through EPIC Collaboration

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the formation of a new collaboration, supported through the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, to construct a human capacity building infrastructure that extends the cyberinfrastructure community to include a much larger number of talented and diverse people.

    Published May 3, 2005

  • Speeding Scientific Workflows: The Open-Source Kepler Project

    The advent of the World Wide Web has brought a whole new world of data, tools, and online services within the reach of scientists. But this wealth of opportunities also brings a new set of challenges, and scientists can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and variety of resources. To overcome this problem, researchers are developing a user-friendly workflow tool that can organize and automate scientific tasks, helping scientists take full advantage of today's complex software and Web services.

    Published May 3, 2005

  • National Science Foundation Sites Awarded 34 Million Hours of Supercomputing Time

    Every three months, a committee of computational scientists from across the country reviews requests for, and awards time at, NSF-supported supercomputing centers. At its recent meeting, 34 million hours of computing time were awarded to 90 projects.

    Published May 3, 2005

  • SDSC SRB Version 3.3.1 Manages Data for Large Scientific Collaborations

    When a large eScience collaboration in the United Kingdom needed to provide comprehensive data management for 16 separate sites connected to a central data repository, the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, known as the SRB, was one of the few systems they selected for an evaluation that is still underway. With innovative features designed to support reliable performance in large-scale scientific collaborations, version 3.3.1 of the SRB is a key component of emerging cyberinfrastructure -- sophisticated technology-supported environments for advancing scientific knowledge -- and the most proven data management software available for the demanding requirements of such major projects.

    Published May 3, 2005

  • UCSD Scientists Use SDSC Supercomputers to Speed Drug Discovery

    More than two decades after it burst onto the scene, HIV/AIDS has claimed more than twenty million lives and continues to devastate societies around the world, particularly in Africa and other developing countries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after years of effort AIDS researchers succeeded in developing a class of drugs that proved to be highly effective against AIDS. By blocking the activity of the viral enzyme HIV protease, these protease inhibitors brought greatly extended life-spans to patients who previously faced early deaths. Structural biology and molecular dynamics computer simulations played an important role in these discoveries.

    Published April 14, 2005

  • SDSC and NCSA directors team up to inaugurate Cyberinfrastructure Partnership Seminar Series

    The directors of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications will appear together Friday, April 15 in the first of a monthly series of seminars on cyberinfrastructure topics as part of the NSF-sponsored Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP).

    Published April 11, 2005

  • San Diego Supercomputer Center's NEESit Introduces NEEScentral 1.0

    NEESit recently introduced its newly created central portal for NEES-wide services -- NEEScentral 1.0. The new program allows NEESit earthquake researchers online access to the San Diego Supercomputer Center's powerful cyberinfrastructure tools.

    Published April 11, 2005

  • San Diego Supercomputer Center Announces 2005 Computing Arts Contest for San Diego Students

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is holding a visual arts contest for San Diego area middle school and high school students now through May 27, 2005.

    Published April 8, 2005

  • Rocks-A-Palooza To Bring Down the House

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center announced today that it will be hosting Rocks-A-Palooza, the first in a series of workshops for users and developers of the Rocks Cluster Distribution Software. Held May 18-19, 2005, the meeting will have two tracks: one for users and another for developers.

    Published March 25, 2005

  • SDSC Project Receives Editor's Choice Distinction in Science Magazine

    San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) researcher Philip Bourne, along with Russ Doolittle, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Song Yang, a graduate student at UCSD, have been recognized by the editors of Science magazine. The team's work in the field of evolution was featured in the "Editor's Choice" section of the January 21, 2005 issue of Science magazine.

    Published March 9, 2005

  • Simulations Reveal Surprising News about Black Holes

    For more than 30 years, astrophysicists have believed that <br/>black holes can swallow nearby matter and release a tremendous <br/>amount of energy as a result. Until recently, however, the <br/>mechanisms that bring matter close to black holes have been <br/>poorly understood, leaving researchers puzzled about many <br/>of the details of the process.

    Published March 7, 2005

  • SDSC Researcher Named One of 50 Most Powerful People in Networking by Network World Fusion

    San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) researcher kc claffy has been named to Network World's 2004 Power 50 list of the most powerful people in networking. Featured in the December 27 issue, claffy, who leads the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) group is featured with other notables such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and Larry Ellison of Oracle.

    Published February 28, 2005

  • SDSC Appoints New Education Director

    The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is pleased to announce that Diane Baxter has been appointed Education Director. Baxter will be responsible for the center's programs designed to educate and reach out to children in kindergarten through high school, with the goal of creating a new generation of scientists and researchers.

    Published February 24, 2005

  • GEON Announces 3rd Annual Meeting

    GEON (the GEOsciences Network) announced that it will be holding its 3rd annual meeting May 5 and 6, 2005 at the Bahia Resort in San Diego, Calif. The conference will provide a forum for discussing current developments and further needs in the area of cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences.

    Published February 22, 2005

  • New Cyberinfrastructure Partnership Launches Publication

    The Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP), a joint, NSF-funded effort of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), this week launched Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch).

    Published February 17, 2005

  • GEON Presentations Popular at GridSphere Workshop

    SDSC GEON developers gave two presentations at the Portal, Portlet and GridSphere Workshop, held February 3-4 at Louisiana State University in conjunction with the 13th Annual Mardi Gras Conference, "Frontiers of Grid Applications and Technologies," sponsored by the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT).

    Published February 15, 2005

  • Maria Goeppert-Mayer Symposium to Be Held March 5 at UCSD

    The tenth annual Maria Goeppert-Mayer Interdisciplinary Symposium (MGM) will highlight original research endeavors at the borders between chemistry, physics, and biology, carried out by prominent researchers from around the world. Named in honor of the co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics, the event focuses on fundamental, interdisciplinary scientific achievements, and as well as encouraging career development for both students and scientists. The 2005 meeting will feature five invited scientific speakers, additional presentations, and an afternoon poster session including three poster awards.

    Published February 5, 2005

  • SDSC Visualizations Featured on the Science Channel's "Top 100 Discoveries"

    Animations from the San Diego Supercomputer Center's (SDSC) visualization department will be featured tonight on The Science Channel's countdown of the "Top 100 Discoveries." Airing this evening at 8 and 11 p.m. (EST), the segment will feature scientific chemistry animations created by SDSC's team of visualization experts

    Published January 19, 2005

  • UCSD, CENIC Partner on First U.S. Campus 'Production' 10 Gigabit Ethernet Broadband Connection for Research, Education

    The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced today that the first production 10 gigabit Ethernet campus connection in the United States was installed from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to CENIC's high-performance backbone network, CalREN.

    Published January 13, 2005

  • SDSC Director Appointed To National Advisory Medical Sciences Council

    Dr. Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been appointed to the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council. The council, which meets three times a year, is composed of leaders in the biological and medical sciences, education, health care and public affairs.

    Published January 13, 2005

  • Public Library of Science and the International Society for Computational Biology Partner to Launch New Open Access Journal

    The Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) today announce the launch of <em>PLoS Computational Biology</em>, an open access, peer-reviewed journal publishing significant biological advances that arise through computation.

    Published January 6, 2005