About USC's Information Technology Services
ITS works around the clock to provide a reliable technology infrastructure capable of adapting to the evolving needs of the USC community. Email and directory services support more than 75,000 users who exchange approximately 12 million messages daily. The Customer Support Center handles roughly 71,000 computer-related concerns from faculty, students, and staff per year. On average, 900,000 Web pages are viewed each day on USC's primary web server, www.usc.edu.
Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC)
ITS provides faculty and student researchers with world-class computing and communications resources through its Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC). The center supports research groups in a variety of disciplines, including bioelectrics, cosmology, engineering, geophysics, linguistics, psychology, and health sciences.
HPCC comprises a diverse mix of computing and data resources, including a central facility that provides more than 550 terabytes of combined disk storage and two Linux clusters that constitute the principal computing resources.
The 1,988-node, quad-core and hex-core, dual-processor cluster contains Dell, Oracle Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM nodes on a 10-gigabit Myrinet backbone. The second cluster contains 787 dual-processor nodes—of which nearly half are dual-core AMD Opteron™ processors—on a 2-gigabit Myrinet network. The combined main memory of the two Linux clusters is more than 31 terabytes; their combined temporary disk storage is more than 490 terabytes. The compute power of HPCC enables USC researchers to tackle grand-challenge class problems in a broad range of scientific disciplines.
In spring 2011, the 1,988-node cluster achieved a benchmark of 126.40 teraflops, or 126.40 trillion floating-point calculations per second. According to the rankings that were announced in June 2011 by the online publication TOP500 Supercomputing Sites, USC's supercomputer cluster is ranked 5th among U.S. academic supercomputers, 17th among all the world's academic supercomputers, and 63rd among all the world's supercomputers.
The USC Network
The university’s network employs a high-performance 10-gigabit-per-second backbone with redundant connectivity to the commodity Internet via the Los Nettos regional network and to the Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail (NLR) networks via the Corporation for Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) network. The primary campus Internet connection is provided by a direct 10-gigabit-per-second connection into a Layer 2 Ethernet switching infrastructure collaboratively maintained by Los Nettos consortium members.
ITS provides campus facilities with links via local area networks that create a variety of wired communications capabilities, ranging from 10 to 1000 megabits per second in offices, laboratories, classrooms and residence halls. Wireless access is provided in most outdoor common areas, libraries, auditoria, campus eateries, and conference rooms.
In addition, ITS provides computing facilities for USC students, faculty, and staff, including central compute servers, home file systems, web pages, multimedia classrooms and general-access user labs. ITS also provides faculty and staff with basic computing facilities and storage, central email, technology-enhanced learning, web portal and collaboration, and single sign-on services.
Under the university’s federated model for providing information technology services, school and department IT groups provide localized services focused on the needs of their core constituencies.
Last updated:
July 20, 2011