Following more than 12 years of extraordinary service as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Michael L. Norman has announced his decision to step down as Director effective June 30, 2021. Dr. Norman will return full time to teaching and research as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics while remaining involved in ongoing SDSC projects as Principal Investigator.
Dr. Norman joined UC San Diego in 2000 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he was a professor of astronomy and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He previously held staff positions at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Norman specializes in computational astrophysics and community application code development for supercomputers. He also directs the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics, a collaboration between SDSC and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS).
Under Dr. Norman’s leadership, SDSC has evolved as a national leader and resource provider of advanced computational resources for the academic research community. As Director, he has been lead PI on several high profile national projects, including major supercomputer systems funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Among those are Gordon, the first HPC system to use solid state flash drives; Comet, the first virtualized HPC system which entered service in 2015 and remains a key system in the NSF portfolio; and Expanse – an innovative hybrid CPU-GPU system featuring public cloud integration and composable systems.
Dr. Norman has also broadened SDSC’s scope to include data-driven science enabled by high-performance computing systems. He is lead PI of the NSF-funded CloudBank project, a multi-year initiative to assist NSF in providing managed services to simplify public cloud access for academic computer science research and education. He also leads the West Big Data Innovation Hub, an NSF program to create collaborations to help solve the grand challenges of regional importance via big data and associated technologies. In service to the broader community, SDSC has created a predictive analytics program resulting in WIFIRE, an NSF-funded initiative to help mitigate the devastating effects of wildfires.
SDSC’s campus service offerings have also greatly expanded under Dr. Norman’s leadership via the Center’s Data-Enabled Scientific Computing, Research Data Services, and Sherlock Divisions. He led the campus Research Cyberinfrastructure Initiative from 2009-2015 that led to the development of the Triton Shared Computing Cluster and colocation data center at SDSC, serving the campus and UC system since 2013. Dr. Norman has also led SDSC to focus on the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced techniques that are rapidly emerging as key components of computationally-intensive and data-driven science. In 2021, SDSC will deploy Voyager, an experimental AI HPC system for accelerating deep learning applications.
An accomplished scholar, Dr. Norman is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, and an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Science and Technology Board of Governors and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness Advanced Computing Roundtable.
Please join us in thanking Director Norman for his many significant contributions to science, engineering, computation, and leadership at SDSC and UC San Diego. We look forward to his continued engagement as an esteemed faculty colleague. A search for a new SDSC Director will commence early in the Winter quarter.
