San Diego Supercomputer Center

This Thursday, Wildfire Science & Technology Commons Opens to the Public to Unite and Accelerate Wildfire Solutions. The Wildfire Science & Technology Commons is a hub for data, models, computing resources, and expertise to enable scientists and technology innovators to collaborate with each other and work with practitioners to move theoretical ideas and experimental workflows into impactful, scalable real-world solutions. With support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Wildfire Commons has been under development since 2024 by a team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego. On July 31st at 10am PDT, the team will host a live online event to introduce the Wildfire Commons and present its features and capabilities in detail. https://lnkd.in/gvXMFjxs

If there was ever a “secret of SCIL,” it is this — working right alongside our partners in the field to truly understand how innovation can make the greatest impact for society. We recently joined our burn boss colleagues from state and local fire departments in Tahoe to continue to understand how they will use BurnPro3D. Our UC Davis field data collection crew also joined us at one of the sites — this is end-to-end collaboration in action! Video by Jesse Woo

Did you know that four billion people face severe potable water distress due to pollution and limited freshwater reserves? One potential solution is seawater desalination, but traditional methods like reverse osmosis can be expensive and time-consuming. Researchers, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Professor Heather Kulik and MIT graduate student Akash K. Ball, are working on advancing the efficiency of reverse osmosis desalination using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as permeable membranes. With the help of U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations on the Expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) — part of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences at UC San Diego — they've identified over 70 promising MOFs that offer high water-stability and high water uptake. MOFs have the potential to reduce energy consumption and costs associated with reverse osmosis desalination, making clean water more accessible to those who need it. Read more about their research: https://ow.ly/FYLN50WuWsC MIT Chemical Engineering (ChemE)

#ThrowbackThursday SDSC/UCSD “Triton Cache” and the SC24 Student Cluster Competition in Atlanta Mary Thomas, Ph.D. UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE)

The Third Annual Single-Board Cluster Competition (SBCC) was recently held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS). Organized by the UC San Diego IEEE Supercomputing Club (SCC) and sponsored by SDSC and RADXA, several global collegiate teams competed by using single-board computers and other similarly simple hardware to create miniature supercomputing clusters and rank them using industry-standard high-performance computing benchmarks. “The club is a great way for students to get experience in parallel computing,” said UC San Diego IEEE Supercomputing Club President Ian Webster. “This competition has been the most fun group project I’ve ever worked on.” Read the full story here: https://ow.ly/UMpf50Ws3OH

What a fantastic start to the week with the #QDMS School at UC San Diego! Learn more about the school here: https://lnkd.in/gwv9KpR4 This week-long program brings together students, postdocs, and researchers for lectures and hands-on training in #quantummechanical, #datadriven, and #multiscale simulations of #water, #ions, #biomolecules, and #materials. We’re deeply grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for supporting our school to help train the next generation of computational scientists. UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, UC San Diego San Diego Supercomputer Center

Rajesh Gupta, a distinguished computer scientist and seasoned academic leader, has been named founding dean of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences, effective July 1, 2025. Gupta brings a wealth of academic and administrative talent to leading SCIDS. Gupta’s continued leadership will be instrumental in shaping the future of SCIDS, which leverages the existing strengths of HDSI and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) — a national center that has, for four decades, led and enabled data and computationally intensive scientific breakthroughs. Trained as a circuit designer, Gupta led the Computer Science and Engineering department, several center-scale efforts sponsored by the NSF and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A distinguished alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Gupta received a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Gupta held the INRIA International Chair at the French international research institute in Rennes, Bretagne Atlantique. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “As founding director of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), Rajesh has played a pivotal role in shaping our university's interdisciplinary, data-driven research landscape. Under his guidance, SCIDS will contribute to UC San Diego's reputation as a leading university, building on our legacy of strength and innovation in high-performance computing, data science and artificial intelligence.” - Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. Read more here: https://ow.ly/E5CI50Wo5Lk

One workshop and two papers were presented this week at the @International Conference on Computational Science in Singapore: The Computational Science and AI for Addressing Complex and Dynamic Societal Challenges workshop explored innovative technological approaches with an emphasis on equitable solutions that benefit all communities fairly. Our paper, Actionable Fire Modeling in Firemap for Extended Attack Decision Support, presented how new Firemap extensions were used during the Los Angeles firestorms of 2025, demonstrating their potential to mitigate wildfire risks, protect communities, and improve firefighting strategies. And the Assimilation of Data for Dynamic Digital Twins by Learning Covariance Information illustrated how covariance information can be learned and used to find an optimal trade-off between observations and simulations when adjusting for the recursion of an internal state. Cheers to ICCSad Amin for great conference! Ilkay Altintas https://lnkd.in/gHgeCH4S

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the University of Florida have made a groundbreaking discovery about how blood flows through the tiniest new blood vessels in our bodies, findings that could revolutionize our understanding of everything from wound healing to cancer treatment. Using powerful supercomputer simulations, they've revealed that individual red blood cells create dramatic, ever-changing forces as they flow past newly sprouting blood vessels – a discovery made using U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations on the Expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)—part of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego. Something surprised the research team, find out what. The story continues here: https://ow.ly/Ashe50WmGx9

Thanks to the UC San Diego Magazine for featuring WIFIRE's operational fire management efforts and some new directions in the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab on the cover of its latest issue. WIFIRE started from federal funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has become a critical part of public safety. It is a perfect example of how federal funding for research directly benefits the public good, and how open science and open data can fuel ongoing innovation with the right public/private/research partnership models. We need to build new models and enabling platforms to scale and sustain open science-driven fire tech that stays in the hands of public service. Let's not cut our vision short by singular modes of innovation. Instead, we can explore new collaborative models around open data fueling AI and cutting-edge science. Cross-sector funding and investments toward all modes of innovation will be key enablers of a solution-focused future. Read at: https://lnkd.in/gEt59F4r UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences San Diego Supercomputer Center Wildfire Science & Technology Commons Melissa Floca Christopher Anthony Genevieve Biggs David Saah Evrim Bunn Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell Brian Fennessy Seth Schalet Climate & Wildfire Institute