High-Performance Computing and Communications

Among supercomputers in an academic setting, HPCC's supercomputer cluster is the 7th fastest in the United States. Among all supercomputers in the world, it is ranked 79th. It claimed this distinction by achieving a benchmark in Fall 2011 of 149.9 teraflops, or 149.9 trillion floating-point calculations per second, on its 2,225-node, 10-gigabit backbone cluster.

HPCC comprises a diverse mix of computing and data resources. Two Linux clusters constitute the principal computing resource. In addition, HPCC has a central facility that provides more than 400 terabytes of combined disk storage and potential access to nearly a petabyte of tape storage, as well as a Condor cluster that uses spare cycles on UNIX workstations and PCs in USC's general-access computing rooms.

Upcoming HPCC Downtimes

In March, HPCC will have two major scheduled downtimes. During the first downtime, on March 12, we will be applying security and operating system patches to Almaak and file servers. During the second downtime, from March 12 to March 19, we will be upgrading the operating system for all our Linux head nodes, administrative nodes, and compute nodes from Centos 5 to Centos 6. After the Centos 6 upgrade, you may need to recompile some of your programs. All Linux systems will be unavailable during this second downtime.

1) Scheduled Downtime for Almaak and File Servers (March 12, 2012)

From 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Monday, March 12, Almaak and file servers for the 2-GB and 10-GB clusters will be unavailable. During this time, security and operating system patches will be applied. Services will be restored as they become available.

2) Scheduled Downtime for the 2-GB and 10-GB Cluster (March 12 to March 19, 2012) /p>

From 8:00 a.m. on Monday, March 12, to 8:00 a.m. on Monday, March 19, all head nodes and compute nodes on the 2-GB and 10-GB Linux cluster will be unavailable due to the operating system upgrade to Centos 6. We anticipate that the head nodes will be brought online on Wednesday, March 14th.

Thank you for your patience while we upgrade HPCC resources to better serve your needs.

Adventures in Technology

A series of informational presentations hosted by Information Technology Services (ITS) Customer Support Center (CSC). Presentations are designed to help USC students, staff and faculty get the most out of the computing resources provided by ITS. The site is regularly updated with new session information, so check back often. adventure

HPCC Research		HPCC System Updates
Theodore W. Berger Large-Scale Hippocampal Model More... David Conti Statistical Methods Development in Genetic Epidemiology More... Ken-ichi Nomura and Weiqiang Wang Applying Parallel Molecular Dynamics Algorithms to Million-to-Billion Atom Simulations More... Michelle Povinelli Slow Light in Photonic Crystals More... Thieo Hogen-Esch Elucidation of the mechanisms of the Yamamoto polymerizations More... James Knowles and Peter Laird Analysis of DNA sequences generated with next-gen technology More... John O'Brien Active and passive nanophtonic integrated circuit components More... Thomas Jordan Using seismic tomography to help reduce earthquake risks More... Carl Kesselman Middleware guru and grid pioneer More... Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu Statistical approach to natural language translation More... Aiichiro Nakano and Ashish Sharma Large-scale scientific visualization More... Priya Vashishta Multi-teraflop supercomputing More... Arieh Warshel Computer simulation of biological processes More... Richard Weinberg Computer animation and visual effects More...		No Scheduled Downtimes