The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). SDSC is located at the UCSD campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
The Baskin School of Engineering, known simply as Baskin Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments: Applied Mathematics, Biomolecular Engineering, Computational Media, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Statistics.
Joel R. Primack is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is a member of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics.
George R. Blumenthal is an American astrophysicist, astronomer, professor, and academic administrator. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.
The Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) is an organized research unit within the University of California system focused on theoretical and experimental high-energy physics and astrophysics.
The Virgo Consortium was founded in 1994 for Cosmological Supercomputer Simulations in response to the UK's High Performance Computing Initiative. Virgo developed rapidly into an international collaboration between a dozen scientists in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, United States and Japan.
Eris is a computer simulation of the Milky Way galaxy's physics. It was done by astrophysicists from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and University of California, Santa Cruz. The simulation project was undertaken at the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Division's Pleiades and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre for nearly eight months, which would have otherwise taken 570 years in a personal computer. The Eris simulation is the first successful detailed simulation of a Milky Way like galaxy. The results of the simulation were announced in August 2011.
Computational astrophysics refers to the methods and computing tools developed and used in astrophysics research. Like computational chemistry or computational physics, it is both a specific branch of theoretical astrophysics and an interdisciplinary field relying on computer science, mathematics, and wider physics. Computational astrophysics is most often studied through an applied mathematics or astrophysics programme at PhD level.
The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is a Research Institute at Durham University, England. It was founded in November 2002 as part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which also includes the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP). The ICC's primary mission is to advance fundamental knowledge in cosmology. Topics of active research include: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of cosmic structure, the formation of galaxies, and the determination of fundamental parameters.
The Bolshoi simulation, a computer model of the universe run in 2010 on the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center, was the most accurate cosmological simulation to that date of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe. The Bolshoi simulation used the now-standard ΛCDM (Lambda-CDM) model of the universe and the WMAP five-year and seven-year cosmological parameters from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe team. "The principal purpose of the Bolshoi simulation is to compute and model the evolution of dark matter halos, thereby rendering the invisible visible for astronomers to study, and to predict visible structure that astronomers can seek to observe." “Bolshoi” is a Russian word meaning “big.”
The Illustris project is an ongoing series of astrophysical simulations run by an international collaboration of scientists. The aim was to study the processes of galaxy formation and evolution in the universe with a comprehensive physical model. Early results were described in a number of publications following widespread press coverage. The project publicly released all data produced by the simulations in April, 2015. Key developers of the Illustris simulation have been Volker Springel and Mark Vogelsberger. The Illustris simulation framework and galaxy formation model has been used for a wide range of spin-off projects, starting with Auriga and IllustrisTNG followed by Thesan (2021), MillenniumTNG (2022) and TNG-Cluster.
Risa H. Wechsler is an American cosmological physicist, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, and Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She is the director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.
The UniverseMachine is a project carrying out astrophysical supercomputer simulations of various models of possible universes, created by astronomer Peter Behroozi and his research team at the Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona. Numerous universes with different physical characteristics may be simulated in order to develop insights into the possible beginning and evolution of our universe. A major objective is to better understand the role of dark matter in the development of the universe. According to Behroozi, "On the computer, we can create many different universes and compare them to the actual one, and that lets us infer which rules lead to the one we see."
Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scientists with the ability to readily collaborate, share, and design scientific workflows.
The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute is a public research institution based in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Genomics Institute's scientists and engineers work on a variety of projects related to genome sequencing, computational biology, large data analytics, and data sharing. The institute also maintains a number of software tools used by researchers worldwide, including the UCSC Genome Browser, Dockstore, and the Xena Browser.
Debora Šijački is a computational cosmologist whose research involves computational methods for simulating the formation and development of the structures in the universe including galaxies, galaxy clusters, and dark matter, including collaborations in the Illustris project. Originally from Serbia, she was educated in Italy and Germany, and works in the UK as a professor at the University of Cambridge and deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.
