News & Events

We've Moved!

View the Data Center build and HPCC move slide show.

We are happy to report that the move of HPCC to its new home at 3434 S. Grand has been successfully completed.

The first phase of the ITS relocation process began on Friday, January 12. More than 60 volunteers showed up on January 12 to take the system apart. The group disassembled approximately 60 racks, each with 40 systems and 3 to 5 cables per system, in about 4 hours.

Thanks to the dedication and hard work of HPCC staff and many volunteers, the disk, login servers, file-sharing servers, main head nodes, Myrinet backbone, and more than 1700 cluster nodes went back up in a very short time. More than 10,000 cable connections were reconnected in a week's time with a very low error rate.

The final build test for HPCC was completed on Saturday, January 27. The testing included a benchmark for full memory size, resulting in a reading of 14.88 teraflops or 14.88 trillion calculations per second. This represents a 1 teraflop increase from April 2006.

The HPCC was able to reach this new benchmark in part because of the new air conditioning system in 3434 S. Grand, which makes it possible to run performance tests without temperature-related issues.

This has been a remarkable effort. People from all over USC helped with the original de-cabling effort, and people from all over ITS, including many directors, have helped with the re-cabling process. Moving this scale of a supercomputer in a week is an incredible achievement. A special thanks to Jim Pepin, Maureen Dougherty and Eric Vincent for planning and overseeing the move and to the following people for their extraordinary work: Hassan Harfouche, Barney Lum, Brian Mendenhall, Noorali Salehani, Bob Schwartzkopf, Garrick Staples, Michael Stone Jr., Freddy Vasquez, and David Villasenor.

The successful relocation of HPCC allows for significant and continued growth, marking the beginning of a new phase in supercomputing at USC.