San Diego Supercomputer Dedication —
October 14, 2008
I’m delighted to welcome you to the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s new building dedication and to share with you our excitement about SDSC’s future contributions and impact.
SDSC is an integral part of UC San Diego, the University of California, and our community.
It provides researchers with the 21st century tools needed for 21st century research. It provides students with a unique resource that helps them compete and excel in a technology-rich world. And it serves as a partner with the private and public sectors, advancing the university’s local impact, national influence and global reach.
The 21st century university enables its researchers to move beyond boundaries, opening up a world of cyberinfrastructure resources and information that supports their efforts. Campuses everywhere are now trying to build the kind of cyberinfrastructure expertise, capability, and collaboration that already exists at UC San Diego.
This new building expansion will help this campus maintain its trajectory as a leading university, and provide a key resource for UC systemwide. It will host extraordinary technology and capacity, including: new resources and space for SDSC’s data center which, with the world’s largest academic digital data storage capacity, houses seismic simulations, historical videos, the Protein Data Bank, and the UCSD Library’s vast digital collection; new classroom and office space that puts researchers and students under one roof; a machine room for computer clusters that’s professionally managed, providing greater capacity and capability; and now, there’s the Triton Resource so researchers can continue their groundbreaking work.
In addition to supporting every day and heroic experiments, SDSC’s expertise also has been called upon in times of crisis. During Hurricane Katrina, an SDSC team worked with the International Red Cross and others to develop a database to help families and friends connect with victims displaced by the storm. Closer to home, a wireless communications team, led by SDSC and SIO, has been providing San Diego firefighters the communications tools they need to battle blazes in remote sections of the county.
All of these achievements have come under the leadership of SDSC Director Dr. Fran Berman.
Fran is considered both a visionary and a pragmatist. In addition to being Director of SDSC, Fran is also a professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Indeed, managing, understanding and preserving data is an overriding theme for SDSC. This critical challenge requires harnessing the tools of the Information Age, and SDSC is an international leader in this area.
SDSC also furthers our position as a leader in sustainability, as demonstrated by this new building – it’s the first LEED Silver equivalent building at UC San Diego. The new building will operate 53% more efficiently than California standards. It has earned a California Public Utilities Commission “Best Practices Award” at its Sustainability Conference. And it will save energy and lower UCSD’s utility bills.
We look forward to working closely with SDSC and Fran to pioneer campus sustainability and campus cyberinfrastructure, further accelerating UCSD’s pre-eminence and leadership.
And now it’s my pleasure to introduce former UC President and former UC San Diego Chancellor, Bob Dynes. Bob served as Chancellor here during SDSC’s transition to UC San Diego and has been a strong advocate of the center.
