San Diego Supercomputer Center: Translating Innovation into Practice

Shawn Strande, Frank Wuerthewein, Ilkay Altintas, Amitava Majumdar, & Yifeng Cui

Published September 11, 2022, SCEC Contribution #12607, 2022 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #244

For more than 20 years, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been a SCEC partner in supporting the earthquake simulations with high-performance computing (HPC) resources and computational expertise. The SCEC Board of Directors recently approved SDSCs membership as a core institution with a focus on expanding opportunities for collaboration in cyberinfrastructure (CI) development, machine learning (ML) and AI, and expanding community engagement that benefit from the two organization’s complementary strengths.

SDSC’s mission is to “Translate Innovation into Practice”. SDSC adopts innovations from industry and academia in the areas of software, hardware, computational & data sciences, and translates them into CI that solves practical problems across all scientific domains and societal endeavors. SDSC is a service partner of the latest NSF Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program.

SDSC operates advanced computational systems such as Expanse, Comet and Voyager, funded by the NSF. SDSC provides 1 million Expanse computing core-hours annually to SCEC in support of SCEC’s computing needs. Expanse was designed to enable research increasingly dependent upon heterogeneous and distributed resources composed into integrated and highly usable CI, integrated with the public cloud and the Open Science Grid. At over 5 Petaflop/s, Expanse is a Dell-integrated cluster powered by AMD’s EPYC CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, connected with 100 GB/s HDR InfiniBand. It comprises 15 SDSC Scalable Compute Units, along with 12 PB Lustre parallel file system and a 7 PB Ceph Object Store system. Voyager is the first-of-its-kind innovative system for conducting AI research using well-established deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, MXNet and Tensorflow. SDSC operates a 19,000 square foot data center fully equipped with 13 MW of power and 400G network. SDSC has a staff of more than 200 scientists, software developers, and CI services experts, including geoscience programs such as EarthCube, WiFire, and OpenTopography etc. SDSC collaborates closely with the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, strengthening its in-house expertise in data-driven research and analytics even further. SDSC also offers advanced computing training programs in HPC, ML and other technical classes/workshops, internship programs ranging from research to project management, and outreach programs targeting K-12 as well as the general public.

Key Words
SDSC, high performance computing, Machine Learning, Expanse, Voyager, ACCESS

Citation
Strande, S., Wuerthewein, F., Altintas, I., Majumdar, A., & Cui, Y. (2022, 09). San Diego Supercomputer Center: Translating Innovation into Practice. Poster Presentation at 2022 SCEC Annual Meeting.

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