San Diego Supercomputer’s ‘Expanse’ formally enters production

The all-new Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the UC San Diego campus. (Image: Owen Stanley, SDSC/UC San Diego)

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego announced that its new Expanse supercomputer formally entered service for researchers following a program review by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which awarded SDSC a grant in mid-2019 to build the innovative system.  

At over twice the performance of Comet, SDSC’s current petascale supercomputer, Expanse supports SDSC’s theme of “Computing without Boundaries” with powerful CPUs, GPUs, and a data-centric architecture that supports a wide range of scientific workloads including experimental facilities, edge computing, and public clouds.

“The name of our new system says it all,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman, the principal investigator for Expanse and a computational astrophysicist. “With innovations in cloud integration and other features such as composable systems, as well as continued support for science gateways and distributed computing via the Open Science Grid (OSG), Expanse will allow researchers to push the boundaries of computing and substantially reduce their times to discovery.”