Soon after NSF Track-1 and Track-2 awards were announced to UIUC and the University of Tennessee, SDSC has announced that it has recruited one of its long-time power users, UCSD Astrophysicist Mike Norman, as Acting Deputy Director of Computational Sciences.
In an email to employees that insideHPC received permission to republish, SDSC Director Francine Berman said:
Mike’s deep commitment to a successful SDSC Track 2c proposal, computational science, high performance computing, and a strong UCSD-SDSC partnership will greatly benefit SDSC.
It seems fair to guess that his job description will be to win one of the remaining two NSF Track-2 competitions for SDSC, which does not have any large new systems in the pipeline. SDSC may be fighting an uphill battle in cost-performance due to the difference in power costs between Southern California and competing areas.