Supercomputers/Systems/Discovery (USC)
USA · operational · mixed
Discovery (USC)
Also known as USC CARC Discovery
Operated by University of Southern California .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- -
- Rpeak
- -
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 20,000
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerator | NVIDIA L40S Accelerators CUDA (Ada Lovelace) · 350 W NVIDIA L40S 3 per node; also A100, A40, V100 and P100 nodes (over 180 NVIDIA GPUs total) | NVIDIA | - | Reported | carc.usc.educarc.usc.edu |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC (Zen2, Zen3, Zen4) 32- and 64-core nodes | AMD | - | Reported | carc.usc.edu |
The read
The general-use HPC cluster of the University of Southern California's Center for Advanced Research Computing. CARC's resource overview states over 20,000 cores across 500 compute nodes, and its services page says around 20,000 CPU cores in around 500 nodes, with over 200 GPU nodes and over 180 NVIDIA GPUs. Node types are AMD EPYC (Zen2, Zen3 and Zen4 generations) with L40S, A100, A40, V100 and P100 GPUs, typically on a 200 Gbps NDR InfiniBand backbone. Both sources are CARC pages, so confidence stays reported. The data center location is not given on the cited pages, so the system is left unlocated. No benchmark FLOPS are published.
Timeline
No dated events recorded.
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Discovery, USC's general-use HPC cluster
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| carc.usc.edu | names system only | - |
| carc.usc.edu | names system and part | NVIDIA L40S |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.