The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego this week formally launched "Comet," a new petascale supercomputer designed to transform scientific research by expanding computational access among a larger number of researchers and across a wider range of domains. The result of an NSF award valued at roughly $24 million, including hardware and operating funds, Comet is designed to meet the emerging requirements often referred to as the "long tail" of science--the idea that the large number of modest-sized computationally based research projects represent, in aggregate, a tremendous amount of research that can yield scientific advances and discovery. Comet joins SDSC's Gordon supercomputer as another key resource within the NSF's XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) computer resource-sharing system, which comprises the most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. To read more, please visit http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=136638&org=NSF&from=news.