History & Mission

Launched in 2000, the University of Southern California's Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) is a global leader in research computing.

HPCC is a vibrant, interdisciplinary partnership supported by numerous schools and departments across USC. HPCC bridges USC's unique strengths in scientific computing, computer science, and communications by supporting more than 110 research groups in a variety of disciplines, including epigenetics, geophysics, materials science, engineering, natural language translation, and health sciences.

The display technology of the USC Center for Data Visualization and Collaboration complements HPCC's compute environment, empowering researchers through the enhanced perspective of large-scale supercomputing simulations.

Among supercomputers in an academic setting, HPCC is the 5th fastest in the United States and it is ranked 65st fastest amoung all supercomputers in the world. It claimed this distinction by achieving a benchmark in spring 2010 with 83.29 teraflops, or 83.29 trillion floating-point calculations per second, on its 1460 node, low-latency 10-gigabit backbone cluster.

USC's HPCC has achieved its current status among the world.s top supercomputer sites through moderate local investments and without national funding. The local aspect of HPCC allows USC researchers unfettered access to a world-class facility.

HPCC resources enable researchers to move beyond the limitations of traditional research to produce new understandings of problems and meaningful results that have far-reaching interdisciplinary impact. Part of the focus of HPCC is to expand the reach of "big computing" by addressing system-level questions in social, economic, and cultural research. With its advanced computing and communications resources, HPCC is helping to create the virtual organizations, virtual worlds, and immersive environments that will continue to transform and globalize higher education in the twenty-first century.