About

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego is one of the nation’s premier centers for high-performance and data-intensive computing.

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego is one of the nation’s premier centers for high-performance and data-intensive computing. It engages millions of researchers, educators and students every year through its five key areas of expertise:

Computing Systems and Infrastructure,
Turning Bytes into Knowledge,
Accelerating Science through Training, Application and User Support,
Translating Research into Impacts, and
Virtual Environments for Science.

SDSC operates within three geographic scopes:

National – Responsive to a range of domestic stakeholders and federal agencies;
State – Including protecting the California way of life including wildfires, drought, extreme weather and earthquake disasters; and
University of California (UC) – providing the UC system and UC San Diego faculty and researchers with computational and data resources to accelerate scientific discovery.

Mission

Advance the frontiers of science, technology, education, and society through innovations in data and computing.

Values

SDSC is a global leader in delivering integrated data and computing solutions that enable translational research, diverse partnerships and talent development.

Located on the campus of the University of California San Diego—just steps from the Pacific Ocean and within San Diego's biotech hub—SDSC is the only center of its kind within the world-renowned University of California (UC) campus system.

Contact SDSC

“SDSC’s core competency is translating innovation into practice. Combining the elements of cyberinfrastructure—the experts, the software, our partners—is the key to that translation.”

Leadership

Led by Director Frank Würthwein, SDSC is organized into six divisions:

Meet SDSC LEADERS

School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences

SDSC is a foundational pillar of the new School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego. Established July 18, 2024, by a unanimous vote of the UC Board of Regents, SCIDS meets society’s compelling need to transform data into actionable knowledge. SDSC’s role is to accelerate the translation of foundational research into practice to help solve real-world challenges related to:

Climate change mitigation – wildfires, extreme weather, water management, resilient agriculture
Social justice issues – food security, housing shortages, mass shootings, equal access to opportunity and
Health care – personalized medicine, public health

As part of SCIDS, SDSC also translates data science from classroom to research and operational scale through its partnership with The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the CENIC Artificial Intelligence Resource project — CENIC AIR.

One of 12 schools at UC San Diego — and just the fourth to be added in the 21st century — SCIDS brings together faculty across disciplines to improve the human condition by better understanding how data shapes society, and to prepare the next generation of highly skilled workers driving artificial intelligence advancements.

Visit SCIDS Website

History

SDSC was established as one of the nation’s first supercomputer centers to address the growing need for computational resources for the academic science community Nov. 14, 1985, under a cooperative agreement by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with UC San Diego and General Atomics Technologies. It is home to Expanse, Voyager, Cosmos, AWARE, DSMLP, NDP, NRP, TSCC, WIFIRE Lab and more.

Explore SDSC Timeline