San Diego Supercomputer Center

About this Brochure On November 14, 1985, the San Diego Supercomputer Center opened its doors on the northwestern corner of the UC San Diego campus and showed off its first supercomputer, a CRAY X-MP/48 — clocking at what one newspaper article called a “mind-boggling” billion calculations per second... a gigaflop. Actually, the peak performance was closer to 800 million calculations per second, but still pretty fast then. Some 100 researchers — all from traditional disciplines such as astrophysics, biochemistry, geology, and oceanography — applied for time on the new supercomputer, which promised to usher in a new era of scientific discovery. Since that day, scientific and technological advances made possible, and/or created by SDSC staff and resources like the original CRAY, have made a major mark in academia, industry, and society-at-large – “turning data to discovery,” a phrase that has become associated with SDSC. The Center has brought together researchers at UC San Diego and across the nation and world, in partnerships and collaborations that now are the hallmark of today’s scientific enterprise. SDSC also has proven to be a good neighbor, providing its expertise and considerable resources to local educators and students, firefighters and other “first-responders,” families of military serving overseas, and others in time of need. To help commemorate SDSC’s 30th anniversary, SDSC has pulled together a timeline of the most significant events in the Center’s history. This timeline, now located outside SDSC’s data center in the building’s East Wing addition, serves as a physical reminder of the historical milestones that have made SDSC a local, state, and national resource for high-performance and data-intensive computing, and a leader in research and development of the nation’s vast cyberinfrastructure. About this Brochure On November 14, 1985, the San Diego Supercomputer Center opened its doors on the northwestern corner of the UC San Diego campus and showed off its first supercomputer, a CRAY X-MP/48 — clocking at what one newspaper article called a “mind-boggling” billion calculations per second... a gigaflop. Actually, the peak performance was closer to 800 million calculations per second, but still pretty fast then. Some 100 researchers — all from traditional disciplines such as astrophysics, biochemistry, geology, and oceanography — applied for time on the new supercomputer, which promised to usher in a new era of scientific discovery. Since that day, scientific and technological advances made possible, and/or created by SDSC staff and resources like the original CRAY, have made a major mark in academia, industry, and society-at-large – “turning data to discovery,” a phrase that has become associated with SDSC. The Center has brought together researchers at UC San Diego and across the nation and world, in partnerships and collaborations that now are the hallmark of today’s scientific enterprise. SDSC also has proven to be a good neighbor, providing its expertise and considerable resources to local educators and students, firefighters and other “first-responders,” families of military serving overseas, and others in time of need. To help commemorate SDSC’s 30th anniversary, SDSC has pulled together a timeline of the most significant events in the Center’s history. This timeline, now located outside SDSC’s data center in the building’s East Wing addition, serves as a physical reminder of the historical milestones that have made SDSC a local, state, and national resource for high-performance and data-intensive computing, and a leader in research and development of the nation’s vast cyberinfrastructure.