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April 2023

Dear SDSC Staff, Collaborators, Partners and All Friends:

Part of leading a pioneering data science and high-performance supercomputing center is exercising SDSC’s commitment to fostering a versatile computing ecosystem. This means serving the research community through our multiple resources—from our supercomputers and storage capabilities to our software frameworks and training programs—all to help meet the emerging needs of academic research.

Since our last Innovators edition, we have reached a major milestone with the national cyberinfrastructure platform called Prototype National Research Platform, or PNRP. This is a distributed system with three primary sites at SDSC, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. The milestone is that PNRP was approved by the NSF to move into full-system operation. For the next three years it will function as a testbed, but early-use cases indicate the system is functioning exceedingly well. There will be more about PNRP in future news releases and editions of this newsletter... 

Expanse Used to Better Understand Friction

Supercomputers Simulate Ways to Improve Gas Turbines

Studies Advance Treatment of Rare Form of Alzheimer’s

‘Cake-Cookie’ Computing Eases Materials Science Research

NSF Names Andrew Ferbert 2023 Trusted CI Fellow

Hubzero® Platform Gets a New Leader

The CICORE Division welcomed spring with the launch of a number of new initiatives focused on building use-inspired solutions rooted in our expertise in cyberinfrastructure, as well as training the next generation of researchers and practitioners to take a convergence research approach in their work. Amarnath Gupta and Ilya Zaslavsky, part of the NOURISH team funded by the NSF’s Convergence Accelerator, have completed the first round of user-engaged research to develop a technical solution to transform food swamps (which often coincide with food deserts) into healthy food systems. Low-income communities in the U.S. have food systems saturated with industrially produced “fast foods” that are cheap, convenient and habit-forming. Meanwhile, fresh food is hard to find. You can read more about the NOURISH team’s work to solve this national challenge. We also wrapped up our first Convergence Research (CORE) Institute bootcamp, led by CORE Institute Director Zaira Razu, with our inaugural cohort of 90 fellows. The theme for this year’s CORE Institute is “Tackling Climate-Induced Challenges with AI,” and the training program is designed to provide researchers and practitioners with a foundational experience to position them for impact throughout their careers on some of the most challenging societal issues of our time. In addition, five members of our team traveled to Sacramento to host a day-long needs assessment workshop with members of the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force. The workshop, moderated by our Director of Strategic Partnerships Melissa Floca, created a vision for the state’s Wildfire and Landscape Resilience Data Hub in partnership with the Climate and Wildfire Institute. And although summer feels far away with the continued cold and rainy days, we are already gearing up for an exciting series of experiential education opportunities this summer, including a design challenge, student internships and our CORE Institute incubator.

Ilkay Altintas
Director, CICORE Division at SDSC

GPUs have become an integral component of computing in almost every research and engineering field. With the rapid rise of AI, it's crucial to understand the potential benefits of GPU-based computing and how it can fit into an organization's business plan. To accurately measure the ROI from accelerating application performance and the associated cost of investing in GPUs, a deep understanding of the underlying architecture and development effort is required. Luckily, SDSC's HPC systems and team of application experts can provide guidance and support for profiling, benchmarking and porting. If you're interested in exploring GPU-based computing, please reach out to me, and I'll connect you with our team.

For the past three years, UC San Diego students have competed in the annual Student Cluster Competition at the Supercomputer conference, with the team winning the top HPL Benchmark Contest last year. Preparing for the competition involves building a cluster, training the new team and traveling to the conference, which is difficult to achieve without the generous support of sponsors. You can contribute in several ways, such as providing hardware or funding student travel expenses. If you're interested in supporting the next generation of supercomputing superstars, please contact Mary Thomas, the team lead.

We have an exciting lineup of events, institutes, and training planned for the coming months, covering topics such as GPU programming, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. If you're unfamiliar with Jupyter Notebooks, they are an interactive web-based environment for working with code, data, and text. Our extensive archive of training material covers a wide range of practical, hands-on programming that can accelerate your business. If you require training that is not currently offered, we can collaborate with you to create a customized training program. Our team thrives on tackling complex challenges, so please reach out to us if you're interested in working together to solve a problem.

We love working on challenging problems, so whether it’s online or in-person, please reach out to us and let us know how we can work together to solve yours.

With regards,
Shawn Strande
SDSC Deputy Director, Interim Industry Partnerships Director

SDSC and SingAREN Commit to Improving Data Access for Researchers in Asia

SDSC and the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN) in Singapore are giving the research community in Asia a big boost with a technology tool to advance scientific discovery in the region. SDSC will contribute a high-performance server that will be hosted at the SingAREN Open Exchange, and SingAREN will provide the high-speed international connectivity.

SDSC to Host Lustre Users Group Meeting May 2-4

OpenSFS is pleased to announce this year’s annual Lustre Users Group meeting will be held at UC San Diego. This is the first in-person meeting of the group since 2019, and it is an excellent opportunity to connect with those running and using large scale, parallel file systems. Registration and event details are available at: https://na.eventscloud.com/website/48957/

Science Gateways Presents Gateway Focus Week

If you are looking to build a sustainability plan for your science gateway, or planning to write your next funding proposal, you may be interested in attending the Gateway Focus Week, May 22-26, 2023, at SDSC. The intensive, week-long workshop will leave you with a clearer definition of your project’s value, its audience, its positioning on the competitive landscape and more. Find more details here. SGX3 internships are also available; see details here.

SDSC Summer Camp Sign-ups Underway

SDSC offers an array of summer camps for middle and high school students, providing an opportunity for them to learn about advanced science, technology, computer science and engineering in a fun and supportive environment. The camps are led by current and retired educators, camp topics for this year include beginning robotics and introduction to object-oriented programming with Java.

Meet Voyager, SDSC's AI-Focused Supercomputer

Voyager will allow researchers to work with huge data sets using standard AI tools, like TensorFlow and PyTorch, or develop their own deep learning models using developer tools and libraries from Habana Labs.

The NSF-supported Voyager project is structured in two phases: 1) a three-year testbed phase and 2) a two-year allocations phase.

Schmidt Futures Fellows Seek to Expand Promise of AI in STEM Fields

Ten UC San Diego postdoctoral scholars are applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to their research in a range of fields as part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures, created to accelerate the incorporation of AI techniques into the natural sciences, engineering and mathematical science.

AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent

In a new paper, UC San Diego and Salk Institute Professor Terrence Sejnowski (author of The Deep Learning Revolution) explores the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary and how to improve them in the future.

For a full listing of news around campus, please visit UC San Diego Today.