San Diego supercomputer center: an overview

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 “friendly users” 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.