Innovators

MESSAGE from the DIRECTOR

Published April 2023

Dear SDSC Staff, Collaborators, Partners, and All Friends:

Part of leading a pioneering data science and high-performance supercomputing center is exercising SDSC’s commitment to fostering a versatile computing ecosystem. This means serving the research community through our multiple resources—from our supercomputers and storage capabilities to our software frameworks and training programs—all to help meet the emerging needs of academic research.

Since our last Innovators edition, we have reached a major milestone with the national cyberinfrastructure platform called Prototype National Research Platform, or PNRP. This is a distributed system with three primary sites at SDSC, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. The milestone is that PNRP was approved by the NSF to move into full-system operation. For the next three years it will function as a testbed, but early-use cases indicate the system is functioning exceedingly well. There will be more about PNRP in future news releases and editions of this newsletter.

In our commitment to leading-edge technology, we recently hosted Chatting GPT, an event that featured a series of speakers and panelists who discussed ChatGPT and other generative AI. The UC San Diego experts explained what it is, how it works, the ethical implications around it, and the impact of its use in the fields of medicine, business, art, and education. The event was hugely popular, with more than 500 participants in-person or online. Personally, I found the event extremely helpful, and encourage you to check out the recording here.

For other updates, please scroll through this issue of Innovators to learn about some recent research outcomes using Expanse and a new AI-powered platform called NOURISH, which is featured in an introductory column called Convergence Research Update. You can also read about our recent Memorandum of Understanding with SingAREN, a research and education network in Singapore, as well as some new honors and appointments for members of our SDSC family. Last but not least, we include a robust list of upcoming programs and events, including our summer campus for middle and high school students.

Thank you for your ongoing interest in and support of the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

My best wishes,
Frank Würthwein
SDSC Director