The current SDSC director is Frank Würthwein, Ph.D., UC San Diego physics professor and a founding faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute of UC San Diego.

He succeeded Michael L. Norman, also a physics professor at UC San Diego, and who was the SDSC director since September 2010.SDSC roles include creating and maintaining the Protein Data Bank, the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Cyberinfrastructure Center (NEESit), cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences (GEON), and the Tree of Life Project (TOL) are especially well known.

In 2009 a combined team from SDSC and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs led by Allan Snavely won the prestigious Data Challenge competition held in Portland Oregon, at SC09, the annual premier conference in High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis for their design of a new kind of supercomputer that makes extensive use of flash memory and nicknamed "Dash".

Dash was a prototype for a much larger system nicknamed "Gordon" that the team deployed at SDSC in 2011 with more than 256 TB of flash memory.

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