San Diego Supercomputer Center

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is a research facility at the University of California San Diego that operates advanced computing systems and develops software for processing large amounts of scientific data. The facility provides supercomputers such as Comet that support both traditional and emerging scientific fields.

The center was established in 1985 as one of five original National Science Foundation supercomputing facilities in the United States. This founding marked the start of modern high-performance computing infrastructure for scientific research.

The center houses the Protein Data Bank, a resource used by researchers worldwide who study the three-dimensional structures of biological molecules. This collection lets scientists from around the world build their work on shared data.

Visitors can explore the facility on the UC San Diego campus, where the center carries out its operations and researchers conduct their work. Access to the actual supercomputers is typically limited to authorized researchers, but the center shares information about its work and resources.

The facility operates Gordon, a specialized system with 256 terabytes of flash memory optimized for data-intensive calculations. This system lets scientists process extremely large datasets much faster than traditional methods allow.