Innovators

MESSAGE from the DIRECTOR

Published February 2024

Dear SDSC Staff, Collaborators, Partners and All Friends:

I hope 2024 is off to a good start for you. The new year is in full swing at SDSC, so we have some exciting updates to share.

To kick things off, I am very happy to report that SDSC is officially an affiliate of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC), a global organization that strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models. Led by Subha Sivagnanam and Claire Stirm, the SDSC group recently held its first official meeting as an affiliate. More than 30 SDSC women-identified participants discussed the group’s vision and goals.  

The National Science Foundation, along with the U.S. Department of Energy, announced an initial call for proposals for access to advanced computing resources to the national research community as part of its recently launched National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot. You can read details about this development in the articles featured below under News Highlights and S3D Update, but essentially the news is that members of the U.S. research community have been invited to submit proposals for projects focused on forwarding safe, secure and trustworthy AI. We are very excited about the potential of this pilot program because it can add curated AI-ready data sources and cloud credits as part of the allocation mechanism—allocations on experimental systems like Voyager and the National Research Platform, and AI resources for educational programs.

Next month, we will be involved with two AI-themed events that highlight cyberinfrastructure collaboration and examine opportunities for designing and implementing future-forward cyber capabilities for research and education communities. The two workshops—5NRP and FABRIC KNIT 8 workshops—are separate but overlapping and will be hosted at UC San Diego between March 19 and March 22. I particularly would like to call your attention to the keynote speaker NSF Director Katerina (Katie) Antypas who will deliver her address March 20. The hands-on tutorials for NRP, Expanse and Voyager—including explanations of the commonalities and differences between these three supercomputers—are also worth noting. In addition, 5NRP will put a spotlight on the “CENIC AIR” initiative. CENIC and SDSC are collaborating to bring AI resources for education to CSUs and beyond. We see this as a pathfinder for advancing AI education at smaller institutions across the United States by reducing the total cost of ownership of AI infrastructure to those institutions.

Additionally, CENIC's Biennial Conference, The Right Connection, will be held in Monterey, CA, March 25 -27. It will feature presentations, demonstrations, panel discussions, plenaries and the customary “hallway tracks” – meetings and discussions that support networking among research and education colleagues.

Finally, the NSF has made available 30 awards as part of the National Discovery Cloud for Climate (NDC-C) initiative to pilot efforts to build an integrated national-scale cyberinfrastructure capable of supporting end-to-end climate research and education. SDSC is contributing to this via multiple awards spanning data infrastructure (NDP and Pelican), CloudBank and a testbed for AI research spanning the computing continuum. SDSC will hold the first NDC-C face-to-face meeting March 6 – 8.

Please enjoy the stories and information we present to you in this edition.

Best wishes,
Frank Würthwein
SDSC Director