San Diego Supercomputer Center and CENIC Work to Expand AI Education Infrastructure in California

According to Thomas DeFanti, retired UC San Diego research scientist currently serving as a principal investigator at the Qualcomm Institute on campus and as senior Research Networks advisor to CENIC’s CEO Louis Fox, the presenters shared the CENIC AIR FAQs with board members before the meeting. Providing this context also included connecting CENIC AIR to the California CENIC-connected contingent of the National Research Platform (NRP), which extends across the United States and is led by Würthwein.

DeFanti remarked on the enthusiasm board members showed during the meeting. “Of particular interest was the involvement of CENIC Engineering in helping campuses set up and, if they want, manage their Science DMZs, a critical infrastructure requirement for Nautilus – the NRP’s distributed computer system – to function.”  

DeFanti also noted that UC San Diego is the primary institution behind the NRP. “UCSD grants have bought most of the computers and storage that make up CENIC AIR and the NRP,” he said. “Other campuses are adding compute nodes and storage. NRP’s big advantage is that SDSC and its partner University of Nebraska-Lincoln provide operations for everyone, so hiring other technical experts is not necessary for campuses to do.”

CENIC AIR was originally suggested by Jerry Sheehan, currently chief information officer (CIO) of the Salk Institute, when he served as CIO at SDSU and received a U.S. National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure grant (CC* grant) to substantially add to Nautilus for several CSUs to use. The Technology Infrastructure for Data Exploration (TIDE) Project, also an SDSC-SDSU partnership, extends the CENIC AIR resource beyond SDSU to three additional CSU campuses: CSU San Bernardino, Cal Poly Humboldt and CSU Stanislaus.

After CENIC awarded a 2024 Innovations in Networking Award for Equitable Access to Cyberinfrastructure (CI) to the TIDE Project earlier this year, Fox said, “It is always gratifying to see how our members use the CENIC network as a platform to advance research and education and, in doing so, inspire other segments and create new opportunities for them which in turn motivates the CENIC team to advance our networks and services.”

The San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute together compose the new School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego. SCIDS meets a critical need in modern society to transform data into actionable knowledge across disciplines to advance data science, AI education and research, and technology.

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