HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND SIMULATIONS (Fall 2025)
Course Number: CSCI 653
Section: 30072
Instructor:
Aiichiro Nakano;
office: VHE 610; phone: (213) 821-2657; email: anakano@usc.edu
Lecture: 2:00-3:50pm M W, THH 108
Office Hours: 4:00-5:00pm W, VHE 610
Prerequisites:
(1) CSCI 596 (Scientific Computing and Visualization); or
(2) basic knowledge of numerical methods (CSCI 501, PHYS 516 or equivalent) +
parallel computing (EE 451 or equivalent) +
3D graphics (CSCI 580 or equivalent).
Textbooks:
D. Frenkel and B. Smit,
Understanding Molecular Simulation: From Algorithms to Applications, 2nd Ed.
(Academic Press, 2001)
A. Grama, A. Gupta, G. Karypis, and V. Kumar,
Introduction to Parallel Computing, 2nd Ed.
(Addison-Wesley, 2003)
W. H. Press, B. P. Flannery, S. A. Teukolsky, and W. T. Vetterling,
Numerical Recipes, 3rd Ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007)
Course Description
Provide students with advanced techniques that are common to high performance computer simulations
in science and engineering. Scalable algorithms for both deterministic and stochastic simulations
of particles and continuum will be implemented on massively parallel and
distributed computing platforms, and the simulation datasets will be visualized and analyzed
in immersive and interactive virtual environment. For details, please see
course information sheet.
Visualization of divide-conquer-recombine based simulation of
photoexcitated electron-hole pairs in organic solar cells.
Announcements
- 8/25 (M): Class begins.
- 8/29 (F): If you have not used CARC (Center for Advanced Research Computing)
cluster, please attend the CARC workshop on Introduction to Scientific Computing
(10 am-12 pm); register
here.
- 8/29 (F): CARC computing accounts
will be requested for students registered in the first week.
- 9/1 (M): Labor Day; no class.
- 9/3 (W): CARC account has been requested for all students.
- 9/5 (F): Assignment 1 due at 11:59 pm.
- 9/8 (M): Seminar by Dr. Danica Adams (Harvard) on
Photochemistry at Mars, Venus and exoplanets through time
at 4:15 pm in SSL 202.
- 9/10 (W): Office hour to discuss assignment 2 at 4 pm in VHE 610.
- 9/15 (M): Assignment 2 due at 11:59 pm.
- 9/24 (W): Office hour to discuss assignment 3 at 4 pm in VHE 610.
- 9/29 (M): Assignment 3 due at 11:59 pm.
- 10/1 (W): A paper on low-rank approximation for the fine tuning of AI
foundation models has been posted in the class schedule below, along with
lecture notes on singular value decomposition and Krylov subspace methods.
- 10/1 (W): See
Alphabet/Google Modeling Talk Series.
- 10/1 (W): See a new AI startup on materials science,
Periodic Labs co-founded by our collaborator,
Dr. Dogus Cubuk;
job openings.
- 10/8 (W): Office hour to discuss assignment 4 at 4 pm in VHE 610.
- 10/13 (M): Seminar by
Prof. Matilde Marcolli (Caltech) on
The algebraic structure of human language resembles the physics of renormalization
at 4:15 pm in SSL 202;
see also her talk on Generative grammar and large language models.
- 10/15 (W): Assignment 4 due at 11:59 pm.
- 11/26 (W): Thanksgiving Holiday; no class.
- 12/12 (F): Final project report (GitHub repository) due.
Class Schedule
