CARC and Researchers Benefit from Reciprocal Partnerships

0.0.0.1 Resources, research grants, and system testing are perks of collaborating with the CARC.

USC’s Center for Advanced Research Computing provides advanced computational research systems to the USC community. CARC goes further than just providing resources, though: it also collaborates closely with the university’s wide variety of research groups, supporting their specialized needs and furthering their research.

Throughout 2020 — and amid a worldwide pandemic — CARC has continued to develop and strengthen its mutually-beneficial partnerships with USC’s researchers.

CARC has a strong partnership with USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and with Carl Kesselman, Director, Informatics Division, in particular. Earlier this year, CARC collaborated with Kesselman on a project proposal for a secure private cloud system to support scientific research in Southern California. In August, the proposal was awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure program. In addition to this project, CARC and Kesselman have plans to collaborate on future projects and research grant proposals.

Another researcher that CARC has a close working relationship with is Andrew McMahon, founding Chair of the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Working with large data sets in the range of 50 to 100 terabytes, McMahon’s lab utilizes CARC resources for bioinformatics analysis of next-generation sequencing data, including experiments to monitor protein-DNA interactions using ChIP-seq, a sequencing method combining chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) with massively parallel sequencing.

Ivan Bermejo-Moreno, Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, uses CARC resources in his research of computational fluid mechanics and turbulent fluid flows. Of CARC, Bermejo-Moreno says, “As a junior faculty working in the area of predictive science and engineering through simulation and numerical diagnostics, my group primarily relies on HPC [high-performance computing] resources, both at USC and at the National Laboratories, to advance our research.” In the spring, Bermejo-Moreno and his team had the opportunity to test CARC’s Discovery cluster before it was released to the general user community, which provided invaluable feedback and quality assurance for CARC.

These are only a few examples of CARC’s commitment to its users and to the larger research community at USC. As its services are expanded and its systems continue to be upgraded, CARC hopes to also increase its number of partnerships, particularly with academic fields that may not have benefited from research computing previously.