NextGens Technologies
November 18-19, 2002 in San Diego, CA

special members' Field Trip
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Wednesday, November 20, 2002

conference overview
2002… and HAL didn't happen in 2001. Are computers still poised to take over the world? There are a number of key hardware and software advances emerging from development labs, both commercial and academic. The long years of research are now giving us exponential breakthroughs.

Emerging new technologies no longer come from one source. There are multidisciplinary approaches involving biology, chemistry, physics, psychology and medicine. The end results of bio-medical and bio-mechanical research will become commonplace in products. As we gain a better understanding of our evolution and behavior, more efficient robots, incorporating artificial intelligence, will begin to dominate. Adaptive intelligence and sensory feedback might even make them almost human.

Powerful new computing engines will allow us to explore the new frontiers of space, sea, and brain. Can we replicate taste, smell, touch, and thought? Our own seemingly haphazard neurons organize themselves in new ways all the time. Are computers far behind? As we push toward new discoveries, the issues of scalability and management will test our supercomputing power.

back to top

speakers
Dr. Leonard Adleman, Professor, Computer Science and Molecular Biology, University of SouthernCalifornia
Dr. Chris Alexander, Architect and Author, The Nature of Order
Dr. David Baar, CTO and Founder, IDELIX Software Inc.
Mr. Jay Beavers, Research Developer, Learning Systems & Technologies Group, Microsoft Research
Ms. Helen Greiner, Co-founder and President, iRobot Corporation
Mr. Nazim Kareemi, President and CEO, Canesta, Inc.
Dr. Joseph Katz, Senior VP, R&D, Symbol Technologies, Inc.
Dr. Steven Low, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Caltech
Dr. Hideo Mabuchi, Associate Professor, Physics and Control & Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology
Mr. Rafe Needleman, Technology Columnist, Business 2.0
Dr. David Overskei, President & Chief Executive Officer, Polexis, Inc.
Dr. Michael Sailor, Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego
Dr. Ben Schwegler, Vice President and Chief Scientist, Walt Disney Imagineering and Development
Dr. Larry Smarr, Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Dr. Chuck Thacker, Distinguished Engineer, Emerging Technologies Group, Microsoft Research
Dr. John Woodfill, Chief Technology Officer, Tyzx, Inc.

back to top

Field Trip description
Founded in 1985, SDSC's mission is to develop and use technology to advance science. In selecting projects and allocating resources, SDSC focuses on five program areas.

• Integrative Biosciences
• Data and Knowledge Systems
• Environmental Sciences
• High-end Computing and Communications
• Grid and Cluster Computing

SDSC is a research unit of UC San Diego, an international leader in high-end computing, data management, and biosciences, and the leading-edge site for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI).

SDSC operates the most powerful high-end computing resources that the partnership makes available to the national scientific community and participates in many NPACI infrastructure development projects. With NPACI's Blue Horizon, a 1,152-processor IBM SP capable of 1.7 trillion calculations per second, and other systems, SDSC leads efforts to deploy the most capable computational environments and make those environments accessible and usable by science communities -- locally, nationally and globally.

SDSC, along with three partner sites, will deploy the TeraGrid, a grid and cluster-computing infrastructure that will be the most comprehensive environment ever for open scientific research. SDSC will house a 4-teraflops Linux cluster and nearly a quarter petabyte of disk storage, connected to TeraGrid partners by a 40-Gbps cross-country network backbone. SDSC's grid and cluster research and development efforts include the GridPort toolkit for developing grid-enabled applications and environments and NPACI Rocks for installing and managing clusters.

In the area of computational biosciences, SDSC, along with Rutgers University and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, operates the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the single international repository of protein structure data, funded by NSF, DOE, and NIH. SDSC hosts the primary PDB Web and data servers as well as enhancing the search interface and tools.

SDSC's Data and Knowledge Systems program is currently leading an NSF Digital Government proposal to develop an Information Integration Testbed. SDSC also plays a vital role in advancing and connecting the nation's critical Internet infrastructure. SDSC is a connection point for most of the nation's high-performance research networks and connects Mexico's high-performance research and education network to its U.S. counterparts. In the emerging area of environmental informatics, SDSC provides computational and data-management expertise for integrating information from different disciplines and across spatial and temporal scales.

back to top