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June 2023

Dear SDSC Staff, Collaborators, Partners and All Friends:

With the end of the academic and fiscal years this month, we look forward to the pleasant pause of summer. But in between travel and vacation days, SDSC will continue humming with activity. 

The proposal for the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) was recently submitted to the UC San Diego Academic Senate. A search committee was formed and will soon begin interviewing candidates for the role of Assistant Dean for the new school.

SCIDS, as the project is nicknamed, will be founded around SDSC and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), which is celebrating its fifth anniversary (I am one of the founding faculty members, as is SDSC’s Ilkay Altintas). As the pillars for the new school, SDSC and HDSI will benefit from collaborations with other campus schools and academic departments, such as computer science and engineering (CSE), electrical and computer engineering (ECE), cognitive science and mathematics (CSM).

To review our roles, SDSC will serve as the operational and translational science core of SCIDS, building on our history as one of the original four national supercomputer centers established by the National Science Foundation nearly forty years ago. HDSI, established five years ago in anticipation of the growth of data sciences, will serve as the academic core of the new school with an established undergraduate program, approved graduate degree programs and generous philanthropic support...

Study Investigates Mystery of Fluid Flow in Stellar and Planetary Environments

National Cyberinfrastructure Prototype Moves into Full System Operation

Expanse Supercomputer Used for Tiny Torque Simulations of DNA Molecules

Expanse Used for Innovative Perovskite Study

SDSC Plays Role on World Stage in UNESCO’s FAIR Symposium

Research Experience for High School Students Can Be a Career Stepping Stone

Pala Band of Mission Indians Recognized for Western Bluebird Data Science Education

As we welcome summer, I am happy to share that we successfully graduated our eighth cohort of students from the MAS DSE program that we co-lead with our Computer Science and Engineering colleagues. I was joined by CICORE Division members Amarnath Gupta, Mai Nguyen, Ismael Perez, Daniel Roten and Ilya Zaslavsky in advising amazing capstone projects, spanning debris flow risk analysis, fire science physics-guided machine learning, and food knowledge graphs. We congratulate all our graduates and wish them a productive career ahead. We also just concluded a seminar series with partners from Los Alamos National Lab and the U.S. Forest Service where researchers came together for roundtable discussions on new research directions to accelerate the advancement of proactive approaches to wildland fire challenges. As you are reading this column, the WIFIRE Lab is preparing for a concept demonstration of the WIFIRE Edge platform in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the Kern County Fire Department. Edge computing is a form of computing that is done on-site or near a particular data source. This opens the door to game-changing technologies in wildland fire response and mitigation by bringing both sensing and computing to the personnel at the fire front where decisions are made. In July, during the National Science Foundation-funded CORE Institute, we will welcome 30 of our CORE Fellows to campus for a weeklong incubator to push forward their convergence research ideas to improve food security, protect coral reefs and reduce the impacts of urban heat islands. The vision behind CICORE is a world where anyone with a transformational idea for a solution to a societal challenge will be able to seamlessly harness data, AI and cyberinfrastructure to put that solution in the hands of the people who need it. My colleagues are running amazing cyberinfrastructure, convergence research and experiential education programs to bring us one step closer to that vision every day.

Ilkay Altintas
SDSC Chief Data Science Officer, CICORE Division Director

Last month we were honored to be the host institution for the OpenSFS annual Lustre User Group meeting. Over 100 Lustre experts, users, supercomputer center staff from national labs, universities and the private sector joined us at UC San Diego for three days of presentations that covered the gamut of technical topics, user experiences and new developments in Lustre and large-scale parallel file systems. It was the first in-person meeting of the group since 2019 and, by all accounts, the attendees were thrilled with the opportunity to hear what their peers were doing and to enjoy some great networking. Generous financial support from DDN, AWS, HPE, Aeon Computing, Penguin, Intel, Seagate, Supermicro and Applied Data helped make the meeting a success. In-kind support from Dell, Jump Trading and Translucent was also much appreciated. If you weren’t able to make it, no worries—all presentations are now available at: https://na.eventscloud.com/website/48957/agenda/. Among the recordings are presentations from SDSC’s Manager of User Services Mahidhar Tatineni that highlight several of our large systems and an invited talk by our director, Frank Würthwein, on the Prototype National Research Platform.

Although the academic year may be winding down on campus, things are just beginning to kick into high gear for the summer. The annual PEARC meeting is just around the corner. Our own Bob Sinkovits is the General Chair, and with the help of Susan Rathbun from our events team, the meeting, which will be held in Portland next month, is shaping up to be another outstanding opportunity to connect with colleagues (https://pearc.acm.org/pearc23/). There are great opportunities for sponsorship, so check out the link here if you’re interested: https://pearc.acm.org/pearc23/exhibitors-prospectus/.

Finally, if it’s not abundantly clear, there is an AI revolution happening. From our perspective this is not just another hype cycle. SDSC is involved in this in multiple ways—from our innovative HPC systems like Voyager, Expanse and the Prototype National Research Platform, which have specialized AI hardware, to our involvement in NSF’s AI Institutes program, to the work of our research groups that are working on applications to apply these technologies to solve real-world problems in areas as diverse as internet security, wildfire management, cardiac image analysis and high-energy physics. If your organization is trying to make sense of AI and how it can help your company gain a competitive edge, we would love to hear from you.

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

Science Gateways 2023 Annual Conference

Join the Science Gateways Community Monday, Oct. 30 - Wednesday, Nov. 1, in Pittsburgh, PA, for their 2023 annual conference. Gateways 2023 is an opportunity for science gateways to showcase their ability to teach, empower and engage research, as well as provide technologies to various communities. It will also offer diverse options for sharing work and networking in the community. The format includes tutorial sessions, presentations, panels, posters, demos and a BYOP – Bring Your Own Portal. For more details, please visit the website.

FacultyHack@Gateway2023

The Faculty Hackathon at Science Gateways 2023 will involve five teams of two computer science faculty or one computer science and one related discipline area faculty. Faculty teams will adapt high-performance computing tools for use in their courses. They will leave with "ready-to-go" course outlines, supporting data and identified resources. Each team will be assigned a technical mentor to help with this process. Teams completing all four challenges receive a $1,000 honorarium. Learn more and apply online.

Hubzero-Supported GHub Tool Helps Provide Insight into Role of Crevasses in Southern Greenland

New research analysis that relied on a tool hosted by GHUb—an online gateway of shared datasets, tools and supercomputing resources for glaciology—has been published by Cambridge University Press. The tool helped researchers identify crevasses from elevation data collected by NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper across 29000 km2 of Southeast Greenland.

SDSC News You Might Have Missed

From news gathering to design and website management to social media and beyond, the External Relations team has SDSC covered.

Plus: A UC San Diego alumni reflects on lessons learned from their science writing internship. Also, a new computational biology study brings researchers closer to treating a rare form of Alzheimer's Disease. Learn about these stories and more: http://ow.ly/YZkh50NjAuh

Surprise: A Small Change Leads to Big Results for Computer Security

Computer scientists from UC San Diego and Purdue University discover for the first time the popular Intel processor has a key security feature already in place that can increase security, including shutting down an entire class of Spectre attacks.

Probing Lithium Ions Near a Solid’s Surface Reveals Clues to Boost Solid-State Battery Performance

Using computer simulations and X-ray experiments, an international team of researchers including UC San Diego nanoengineers uncovered nanoscale changes inside solid-state batteries that could help improve battery performance.

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