[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 21 (Thursday, February 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E251-E252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


IMPACT OF THE SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER ON SAN DIEGO AND THE STATE 
                             OF CALIFORNIA

                                 ______


                         HON. BRIAN P. BILBRAY

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, February 2, 1995
  Mr. BILBRAY. Mr. Speaker, since 1985 approximately $200 million has 
been invested in the San Diego Supercomputer Center [SDSC]. Of this 
amount, the National Science Foundation has contributed $150 million, 
the State of California $21 million, and a large number of other 
government agencies and industrial partners $25 million--in cash and 
kind. This investment has
  Caused businesses to invest their computing dollars in California.--
MacDonnell Douglas has purchased a large subscription of supercomputer 
CPU time to do design work on its new passenger aircraft, the MD-12, 
and the space station Freedom. General Dynamics housed all of its 
advanced computing in SDSC.
  Encouraged start-up businesses and research consortia to site their 
headquarters in California.--SDSC's presence was a key reason the 
international thermonuclear experimental reactor [ITER] project sited 
its headquarters in San Diego. This project, valued at $1.2 billion, is 
a 10-year international collaboration among scientists in the United 
States, Germany, Russia, and Japan to develop a nuclear reactor design.
  Similarly, Supertek, a producer of minisupercomputers, decided to 
site its operation in California. The company has since 
[[Page E252]] been purchased by Cray Research, Inc. Minneapolis, MN, 
which has productized the machine to expand the range in capability and 
price of the supercomputers it sells.
  As a result of close relationships with SDSC management, the editor 
of the journal Supercomputing Review decided to site his publishing 
operation in San Diego. The journal has since renamed itself High-
performance Computing Review and has established a commercial 
electronic news service, which now serves over 11,000 subscribers.
  Produced spin-off companies.--Two operations that were spun off from 
SDSC are Distributed Computing Solutions [DISCOS] and the California 
Education and Research Federation Network [CERFnet]. DISCOS produces a 
long-term file storage software product, called DataTree, that runs on 
a variety of hardware platforms. A UNIX-based version of this product, 
called UniTree, is now also being marketed. These systems have been 
purchased by a large number of supercomputing facilities around the 
country. DISCOS, formerly a division of General Atomics, was sold 
recently to Open Vision Technologies, Inc.
  CERFnet, a division of General Atomics, is a regional communications 
network that connects academic institutions and private industry mainly 
in southern California with the Internet. It was begun with a grant 
from NSF. Recently, as a result of its success in operations and 
service, CERFnet was awarded an additional $4.5 million contract from 
NSF to establish a commercial business to provide information on 
electronic resources and services available on the growing, and itself 
increasingly commercial, Internet.
  Employed over 110 professional staff and, at any given time, some 30 
part-time students.--DISCOS and CERFnet together have provided an 
additional 3 dozen jobs in San Diego.


                      sdsc's impact in other areas

  SDSC has had an impact on San Diego and the State in other areas that 
are more difficult to quantify. This impact has been noticeable in:
  A more highly trained work force.--SDSC has trained hundreds of 
undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom have remained in 
California as skilled professionals in high-technology industry.
  The next group SDSC has targeted for training is high school science 
and math teachers through the Supercomputer Teacher Education Program, 
funded by a $1.575 million grant from NSF. SDSC will work with over 40 
teachers from primarily minority high schools in a 3-year program to 
teach them about computational science and help them incorporate the 
techniques into their class curricula. Each of those teachers, in turn, 
will train well over 100 students per year.
  Advancements in computational hardware and software.--SDSC supports 
close collaborations with various vendors and academic researchers--
many of them within California--to develop, implement, and integrate 
parallel processing systems, link them by high-speed networks, and 
develop software such as code debuggers, performance analyzers, 
resource managers, and accounting tools. The goal of this work is to 
make powerful computer systems easier to use by large numbers of 
researchers.
  Greater scientific understanding of problems affecting day-to-day 
life. In some cases this insight has led to legislative action to curb 
the problems.--SDSC is involved in scientific collaborations that are 
leading to greater understanding of scientific problems such as AIDS 
and Alzheimer's disease, air/water pollution, and global change.
  One project is focused on designing a drug to inhibit the HIV 
protease. The HIV protease consists of two molecules; separated, they 
are harmless, but when docked together they produce AIDS symptoms. 
Researchers are trying to inhibit the harmful activity by creating a 
drug that looks like one of the molecules so it will dock with the 
other, but has different chemical properties so the docking will not 
produce harmful effects. Researchers from SDSC, Duke University, and 
UCSF have produced such a model using Sculpt, a program that 
interactively models the underlying physics and chemistry of a molecule 
as it is designed. This work could not have been done without Sculpt, 
which removes human guesswork from the process and runs 100 times 
faster than other commercially available systems. The next step is to 
synthesize and test the molecule in the laboratory.
  In another project, a study of smog in the Los Angeles basin led to 
changes in local abatement policies. This work was done in 
collaboration with the California Air Resources Board.
  In a third project, Project Sequoia 2000, SDSC is part of a research 
team to develop an advanced information management system to improve 
the productivity of global change scientists. This system, with 
advanced storage, data management, visualization, and networking 
capabilities, is likely to have application to a wide range of other 
scientific disciplines. SDSC's participation in this project was 
critical to the University of California winning the $15 million 
Digital Equipment Corp. grant. For additional important scientific 
projects, see ``SDSC's Effectiveness,'' below.
  A heightened awareness among government and industry of the economic 
benefits to be derived from computational technology.--Because of 
SDSC's success, there is now interest in establishing a satellite 
supercomputer facility in San Jose that will create jobs, attract 
industry to that area, and promote local area networking.
  SDSC and San Diego city government are discussing how to provide CPU 
power and computational expertise to local-area business for defense 
conversion and to enhance product engineering. They are also discussing 
how to implement a county-wide network to link government offices, 
academic-research institutions, libraries, medical facilities, and, 
eventually, homes to enhance information exchange, improve medical 
services, and promote economic development in general. In fact, SDSC 
Director Sid Karin has become a member of the City of the Future 
Committee created recently by San Diego Mayor Susan Golding. An early 
focus of this committee is county-wide telecommunications.
  SDSC has some 45 industrial partners. These partners gain a 
competitive advantage by obtaining access to state-of-the-art 
computational technology for use in product engineering. This 
technology helps such businesses
 produce better quality goods in a shorter period of time. In addition, 
such businesses gain the opportunity to experiment with various 
hardware platforms. This allows them to choose the most appropriate 
systems for their needs without facing the impossibly high startup 
costs in hardware and personnel associated with establishing a full-
featured high-performance computing facility.


                          sdsc's effectiveness

  Additional evidence of SDSC's effectiveness is shown by the broad 
scope and tangible effect of the research being conducted. Below is a 
sampling of projects leading, for example, to new commercial products; 
a cleaner, safer environment; the development of new materials; and 
medical breakthroughs. Many of these projects are collaborative efforts 
lead by researchers at universities in California and State and Federal 
agencies.
  Industrial engineering.--Plastic injection mold design work by 
GenCorp to create a more durable Corvette car body; and design work by 
Caltrans to simulate a crash test bogie, a typical small, 1,800-pound 
car used to evaluate the safety of breakaway sign and lighting supports 
along roads and highways. Another project involves evaluating the 
characteristics of a potential new material for pavement consisting 
partly of recycled tires.
  Environmental and Earth science.--Modeling a sewage spill off the 
coast of San Diego, which provided important information about sewage 
outfall engineering, containment, and cleanup. Similarly, scientists 
have demonstrated the effects of tides, currents, and atmospheric 
conditions on the distribution of pollutants in San Francisco Bay. This 
work was done in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo 
Park, CA; modeling regional and global climate to understand 
interactions between the atmosphere and oceans or to study specific 
problems such as the periodic development and dissolution of the ozone 
hole over Antarctica; and studying fluctuations in the Earth's gravity 
field to better understand the formation of the Earth's surface and the 
movement of continental plates.
  Materials science.--Studying the structures of various molecules to 
better understand their properties and evaluate their potential use in 
synthetic materials.
  Medical science.--Studying the causes of fibrillation in heart 
tissue, which can lead to sudden cardiac death syndrome killing some 
500,000 people per year in North America alone; reconstructing 
ultrasound data computationally into three-dimensional images to 
diagnose health problems noninvasively; simulating the coiling and 
knotting processes of DNA, which have implications for fundamental 
biological activities such as replication, transcription, and 
recombination; and calculating the stress exerted on developing bones--
this is one area where stress has been shown not only to be beneficial, 
but crucial for proper development.


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