Innovators

MESSAGE from the DIRECTOR

Published August 2023

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

Here we are again, at the dawn of a new academic year, eager to see what the days ahead may bring. In many ways the summer months have been customary with travel, annual conferences, and casual gatherings, but one event in particular stands out to me as extraordinary. That was our own Executive Team Retreat.

Held at the inspiring setting of Scripps Seaside Forum earlier this month, the retreat included discussion and development of our strategic plans for SDSC over the next five years. While we examined priorities and proposed initiatives, with some healthy discussion and disagreement in between, it was remarkable to me that when the full team was split into two separate groups to complete an exercise around top-level goal setting, the groups’ proposed goals were virtually identical! I am quite proud of this outcome and the team around me: Ilkay Altintas, Brian Balderston, Sandeep Chandra, Cynthia Dillon, Christine Kirkpatrick, Fritz Leader, Amit Majumdar, Shawn Strande and Michael Zentner. Special thanks to Executive Consultant Anke Kamrath and the Strategic Planning Facilitation team, Esther Coit, from Patera Design, and Laura Araujo, for their key roles in the process. The strategic planning process is far from finished, as we will engage the entire center between now and late October to turn high-level goals into actions for which progress is measurable.

Another recent event for which SDSC had a strong showing was PEARC23. The conference theme was “Computing for the Common Good” and it provided a range of engaging events for researchers to share their work. Twenty-three SDSC researchers and staff represented, with SDSC’s Bob Sinkovits as the PEARC23 general chair and Ilkay Altintas as a plenary speaker. Learn more about who from SDSC participated in the article about PEARC23 below.

On a different news front, CENIC has announced the start of a new phase of its backbone program—the upgrade of major node sites to support native 400 Gbps handoffs from member institutions, beginning with the San Diego node site located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The Sunnyvale, Emeryville, Sacramento, Riverside, Tustin and Los Angeles node sites are scheduled to be completed through this fiscal year. You can read more about this development under In the News on our website.

Another news development relates to the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) Initiative—a pilot project that democratizes data-driven scientific discovery across an open network of institutions via data delivery, shared storage, computing and more. Its latest efforts include the growing NSDF Catalog, which currently houses nearly 70 repositories ranging from geosciences databases to NASA imagery datasets (I encourage you to read the full news story – a link is also accessible below under our SDSC News Highlights). I look at this as part of a larger SDSC thrust towards a horizontally and vertically open data infrastructure for all of science. Horizontally open to be able to federate any science data no matter where it is located, making any data, anywhere, anytime accessible via a “content delivery system” with data caches in the internet backbone. Vertically open to allow the community to ultimately implement knowledge networks based on FAIR principles via federated catalogs.

Thank you for your time and interest. As always, we are grateful for your support and commitment to our efforts. It is a pleasure to serve as director for this impressive center.

Best wishes,
Frank Würthwein
SDSC Director