Innovators

MESSAGE from the DIRECTOR

Published August 2024

Dear SDSC Staff, Collaborators, Partners and All Friends:

This summer marked an exciting milestone for our community. Last month, the University of California Regents approved the new School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences at UC San Diego. SDSC represents a core pillar of the new school, along with the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. This foundational role is a testament to our national leadership in transforming data into actionable knowledge—and an opportunity to grow our impact in new ways. The stories in this newsletter are some recent highlights emphasizing how well positioned SDSC is to contribute to the mission of the new school.

It is probably no surprise that our engagement with AI builds on a foundation of compute and data infrastructure excellence, and extends from there to applications of AI to a wide range of domains (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, etc.), as well as interdisciplinary solutions to societal problems. We will cover more of these applications of AI in future newsletters.

As part of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot program, the U.S. National Science Foundation awarded a $5.3M supplement to our flagship supercomputer Expanse. We also were awarded $5 million to acquire and deploy the new Cosmos system. According to PI Mahidhar Tatineni, Cosmos will enable researchers to exploit its innovative and powerful accelerator technology by advancing the adoption of accelerators across the entire spectrum of scientific software developed by the community. The aspirational tagline of Cosmos is thus very appropriately: “No software left behind.” The benefits of accelerating applications will enable discoveries in AI, astrophysics, genomics, large language models, materials science and many other domains. Tatineni is joined on the Cosmos project by Co-PIs Subhashini Sivagnanam, Andreas Goetz, Igor Sfiligoi and Christopher Irving.

Cyberinfrastructure as we see it goes beyond systems, software and services to include the experts that make it all possible. We are thus very proud of our wide range of internship programs. In this newsletter we highlight our internship to onboard undergraduates into our agile development program. This program, led by Ryan Nakashima, Jenny Nguyen and Steven Yeu, lets students explore a range of careers at SDSC, as well as the wider technology sector.

Everything we achieve is driven by the dedication and talent of the incredible people on our team. I would like to close by highlighting the SDSC 2024 Pi Person of the Year, Mahidhar Tatineni, who has had a truly phenomenal impact in the realms of both science and cyberinfrastructure. I encourage you to read the full story to learn about his vast accomplishments.

Best wishes,
Frank Würthwein
SDSC Director