Groups, Labs, & Projects

Research Groups & Labs

SDSC's labs and groups offer a number of cyberinfrastructure services to scientists and engineers, helping them reach their goals quickly and more efficiently. The center's users can tap into a number of groups with expertise in areas such as data management, visualization and grid development.

Advanced CyberInfrastructure Development (ACID)

The ACID Lab harnesses cutting edge cyberinfrastructure to transform data into actionable knowledge and information. Lab research and development activities range from data acquisition, management, integration, analysis and visualization to data science and analytics that unlock new insights, facilitate discovery, and promote evidence-based decision-making.

Computational Chemistry Lab

The computational chemistry lab develops and applies molecular simulation methods and software for high-performance, distributed, and data-intensive computing platforms. Methods used in the lab range from quantum mechanics to classical molecular mechanics, statistical mechanics, molecular dynamics, machine learning and modern data science. Application areas include biochemistry, biophysics, atmospheric chemistry, catalysis and materials science. Details about the computational chemistry lab can be found on the website of the lab director Dr. Andreas Goetz (linked in lab title above).

RDS Data Initiatives

SDSC's Research Data Services division, headed by Christine Kirkpatrick, provides a suite of data science services (including custom compute solutions, storage for all purposes, research data management, etc.), and supports data-driven research on a national level. Furthering the mission of the National Data Service (NDS), SDSC's Data Initiatives program has helped grow RDS's ability to enable scientists and researchers to find, reuse, and publish data by by winning NSF-funded projects such as the EarthCube Office and the West Big Data Innovation Hub, as well as establishing the first U.S. GO FAIR office at SDSC.

High Performance Geocomputing Lab (HPGeoC)

HPGeoC is conducting research and development in high performance computing, data intensive computing, and grid computing to support geoscience applications, with particular emphasis on computational seismology. HPGeoC is in collaboration with Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) and other academic, industrial, and national lab partners to develop state-of-the-art techniques and applications supporting petascale earthquake computing.

Scientific Applications Group

SDSC’s Scientific Applications Group engages in activities that enable researchers spanning the physical and biological sciences, engineering, social sciences and the arts to make the most effective use of high performance computing. The group collaborates on software development, optimization and parallelization projects in addition to performing independent research in a variety of domains. Work is funded primarily through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in addition to awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), industry and private foundations. The group also benchmarks existing applications to determine optimal scaling behavior, evaluate the performance of emerging architectures and assess new programming languages and extensions.

Spatial Information Systems Lab

The Spatial Information Systems Lab conducts research and develops technologies and infrastructure that enable users to access, integrate, and manage spatial information. Application domains range from hydrology and environmental sciences, to neuroscience. The lab focuses on cyberinfrastructure for managing observational data, distributed information systems, web services and XML schemas for standards-based data interchange, spatial data integration and GIS, online data discovery, and visualization.

Structural Bioinformatics Lab

The Structural Bioinformatics Lab’s research and development activities are broadly centered around the 3D structures of proteins and nucleic acids, and the integration of structural data with other domains such as Genomics, Bioinformatics, Drug Discovery, and Biomedicine. The lab is interested in the development of scalable algorithms to enable the efficient mining, analysis, and visualization of the rapidly growing data volumes in bioinformatics. The lab explores the application of Big Data technologies and Machine Learning to biomedical problems.

Research Projects

SDSC serves as a critical IT partner to large scale research projects in life sciences, geosciences, engineering and other disciplines. SDSC researchers collaborate on projects ranging from cellular signaling to earthquake effects to preserving large and irreplaceable data.

In addition to extending the reach of scientific accomplishments by providing high-performance hardware technologies and integrative software technologies SDSC's mission also includes providing deep inter-disciplinary research expertise to the community.

Groups, Labs, & Projects

Research Groups & Labs

Research Projects

Biological Sciences

Computer Science & Technology

Data & Knowledge Systems

Earth Sciences

Engineering