San Diego Supercomputer Center Celebrates 30 Years Supporting the Long Tail of Science

For the past 30 years, users of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) systems have achieved major scientific breakthroughs spanning many domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT.
A few milestones include:
1987: Scientists take a major step in the new arena of rational drug design, determining the relative free energies of binding for different chemical inhibitors. The result is significant, since what makes drugs effective is that, at the molecular level, binding at the site where it acts.
1999: Molecular dynamics simulations provide new insights into attacking integrase, which helps the HIV virus hijack the body’s cells. The simulations lead to Isentress, hailed as the most important new AIDS drug in a decade.
2014: Researchers investigating the genome of a 115-year-old woman discover many somatic mutations that arose during the woman’s lifetime, concluding that few of them mapped to genomic regions that code for proteins, whereas most were in regions predicted to have little impact on genetic fitness.
SDSC’s Comet system, launched in April 2015, is one of the world’s most powerful HPC systems for data-intensive computing. With 1,944 nodes utilizing Intel Xeon processors E5, 36 nodes accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs, and four large-memory nodes each with 1.5 TB of DRAM, Comet is designed to support up to 10,000 users.