San Diego supercomputer center: an overview
Authors: Dan Sulzbach
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (1988)

Access to high-performance computers is essential for scientists and engineers at universities and research institutions throughout the U.S. It provides them with the ability to use the most advanced computers for their work. This is vital in today's highly competitive world. Supercomputing offers scientists and engineers the opportunity to use computer models to simulate conditions difficult or impossible to create and measure in the laboratory. Supercomputers are tools of the imagination that enable researchers to use computational science to reach beyond the realm of theory and experimentation. Every researcher who requires supercomputer resources should have access to them. The National Science Foundation supercomputer centers were established to provide scientists and engineers access to high-performance computing resources for research and education. NSF sponsors five supercomputer centers: the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University; the John von Neumann National Supercomputing Center at Princeton University; the Cornell National Supercomputing Facility at Cornell University; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Each of the NSF centers is a national resource. They serve scientists and engineers throughout the United States. All are accessible via NSFnet. Supporting users of the NSF centers is a new problem for many university and college user services organizations. It is one that the user services staff at the centers can help solve. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) started operation in December, 1985, when a group of &ldquo;friendly users&rdquo; helped us break in our CRAY X-MP/48 supercomputer manufactured by Cray Research, Inc. Now SDSC has both the CRAY and an SCS-40/XM minisupercomputer manufactured and donated to SDSC by Scientific Computer Systems. The CRAY has four independent high-speed processors and 64 million bytes of shared memory. When all four processors are working on a problem at their peak rate, they are capable of performing 845 million arithmetic operations per second. The SCS has a CRAY X-MP-compatible instruction set and runs at about one-quarter the speed of one of the four processors in the X-MP/48. Over 90% of the time available on the CRAY and 75% of the time on the SCS is allocated for research and education. Most time is allocated on the basis of peer-reviewed proposals. Any U.S. researcher or educator can submit a request for time to be used for research or education. Ten percent of the available time on the CRAY is earmarked for research by industrial participants. SDSC also serves a consortium of 25 university and research institutes that each receive a block of CRAY time for internal allocation. Most of the block grant time is used to provide small allocations for graduate student projects, instruction, and start-up projects. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is currently used by nearly 3,000 researchers at over 140 institutions in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Approximately 90% of our usage is accounted for by users outside the San Diego area, 50% by users outside California. SDSC's user community consists primarily of faculty and graduate students, who together comprise over two-thirds of our users. The remaining third consists of postdocs, undergraduates, research staff, and industrial participants. An important difference between SDSC and most other computer centers is that most of our users are remote users. It is generally not possible for our users to drop by our offices for help. SDSC's User Services Department provides consulting, training, and documentation to help our users and, thereby, lessen any load on local support staff. In addition, however, we are anxious to help the local user service organizations who may now be confronted with yet another system to support. Although the NSF supercomputer centers are relatively new, they have already had a decided impact on science and engineering. The San Diego Supercomputer Center, for example, currently provides high-performance computing for over 700 different research projects. Over 800 papers, conference presentations, theses, books, and reports have been based on work done at SDSC. The other centers have had similar impacts. Many disciplines are represented among SDSC's users. In 1987 we delivered over 30,000 CPU hours to users. Disciplines that used large fractions of this total included Astronomy (3.4%), Atmospheric Science (11.2%), Biochemistry (9.1%), Chemistry (13.8%), Earth Science (4.5%), Materials Science (10.4%), Mathematics (1.2%), Mechanics (5.2%), Oceanography (2.2%), and Physics (20.6%). In addition, the block grants to consortium institutions accounted for 14.1%. It would be impossible to list here the many projects being done at SDSC. They span a wide range of topics from the evolution of the universe to the interaction of subatomic particles. Representative projects being done with the facilities at SDSC include the following: Cosmologists are simulating the evolution of the universe to examine theories accounting for the universe's &ldquo;missing mass.&rdquo; Geologists are modeling the interaction of large-scale mantle convection currents and continental plates to help understand the forces affecting plate tectonics. Neuroscientists are using computer reconstructions of photomicrographs from high-energy electron microscopes to visualize disease processes in neurons from patients with Alzheimer's disease. Biochemists are performing the complicated calculations necessary to study the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules. Particle physicists are simulating the collisions of subatomic particles. The initiation of the NSF supercomputing program marked the advent of a new era of U.S. science and engineering, an era in which access to high-performance computing became an enabling rather than a limiting factor. Already the dividends of this program are manifest. With continued support and upgrades, the NSF centers will remain a valuable national resource, and they will help America's researchers sail into the next decade. Cooperation between the NSF centers' user services staffs and the local staffs of universities and colleges can help ensure smooth sailing for everyone.