Partners
The Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) strives to bring our users the best systems and services available on the market. We accomplish this through mutually beneficial partnerships with prestigious academic institutions and leading companies in the technology industry. Transformative research with real-world implications is made possible through our academic collaborations. And, in exchange for rigorous benchmark testing, our industry partners supply us with custom-built prototype cyberinfrastructure and cutting-edge software and hardware systems.
Not only do our users benefit from new research pathways and access to state-of-the-art systems, but these partnerships bring opportunities for student internships, research collaborations, and visiting scholar programs.
If you are interested in establishing a partnership with CARC, please reach out to us at carc-support@usc.edu.
0.0.1 Current Partnerships
0.0.1.1 Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
Starting in May 2023, The Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) entered into its first ever official industry partnership with Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. This partnership was made possible through the initiative of the ITS Chief Information Officer, and BD Kim, ITS Associate Chief Research Information Officer and Director of CARC.
Samsung designed and delivered prototype hardware with new memory and storage solutions aimed at improving the performance and cost of data processing for small file chunks, high-resolution images, and heavy input/output. The Research Facilitation team at CARC is especially equipped with the knowledge and expertise required to test out these prototypes and guide USC faculty in using them to conduct innovative research.
As this partnership develops, plans are in place are to eventually bridge research labs at USC and Samsung, develop internships programs for students, and explore a visiting scholar program that would bring Samsung researchers to USC’s campus. CARC and Samsung work closely with the Viterbi School of Engineering to develop these programs and foster collaborations.
0.0.1.2 VAST
With negotiations starting in November 2022, VAST and CARC agreed to enter into a partnership in 2023. VAST delivered a testbed nonvolatile memory express (NVME) storage system for CARC to deploy and run benchmarks on. NVME is a new storage access and transport protocol that offers greatly increased I/O performance over the traditional spinning disk storage that CARC’s current project file system uses.
The team at CARC is running benchmark tests on this cutting-edge system to evaluate the its benefit for research workloads that are currently bottle-necked by storage performance.
0.0.1.3 NVIDIA
CARC has had a close relationship with NVIDIA for several years. In addition to utilizing NVIDIA hardware in our cyberinfrastructure, NVIDIA hosts an annual workshop for CARC users on topics such as GPU accelerated computing and deep learning fundamentals.
In 2023, CARC started testing NVIDIA’s breakthrough system, the Grace Hopper Superchip. This new system delivers vastly higher performance for data-intensive research workloads, improving compute efficiency.
CARC staff is running image classification deep learning and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code benchmarks on the Grace Hopper system to test performance.