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.