The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

facility located on the western end of the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

campus, just north of

Columbus Columbus is a Latinized version of the Italian surname "''Colombo''". It most commonly refers to: * Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the Italian explorer * Columbus, Ohio, capital of the U.S. state of Ohio Columbus may also refer to: Places ...

. Established in 1987, the OSC partners with Ohio universities, labs and industries, providing students and researchers with

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

, advanced cyberinfrastructure, research and computational science education services. OSC is member-organization of th
Ohio Technology Consortium
the technology and information division of the Ohio Department of Higher Education. OSC works with an array of statewide/regional/national communities, including education, academic research, industry, and state government. The Center's research programs are primarily aligned with three of several key areas o
research
identified by the state to be well positioned for growth and success, such as the biosciences, advanced materials and energy/environment. OSC is funded through the Ohio Department of Higher Education by the state operating and capital budgets of the

Ohio General Assembly The Ohio General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Ohio. It consists of the 99-member Ohio House of Representatives and the 33-member Ohio Senate. Both houses of the General Assembly meet at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus ...

History

OSC was established by the Ohio Board of Regents (now the Ohio Department of Higher Education) in 1987 as a statewide resource designated to place Ohio's research universities and private industry in the forefront of computational research. Also in 1987, the OSC networking initiative — known today as

OARnet The Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet) is a state-funded IT organization that provides member organizations with intrastate networking, virtualization and cloud computing solutions, advanced videoconferencing, connections to regional and inter ...

— provided the first network access to the Center’s first Cray supercomputer. In 1988, OSC launched the Center’s Industrial Interface Program to serve businesses interested in accessing the supercomputer.

Battelle Memorial Institute Battelle Memorial Institute (more widely known as simply Battelle) is a private nonprofit applied science and technology development company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Battelle is a charitable trust organized as a nonprofit corporation u ...

, located just south of Ohio State, became OSC’s first industrial user. Today, the Center continues to offer HPC services to researcher in industry, primarily through its AweSim industrial engagement program. In the summer of 1989, 20 talented high school students attended the first Governor’s Summer Institute. Today, OSC offers summer STEM education programs throug
Summer Institute
an
Young Women's summer Institute
which began in 2000. Later in the fall of 1989, OSC engineers installed a $22 million Cray Y-MP8/864 system, which was deemed the largest and fastest supercomputer in the world for a short time. The seven-ton system was able to calculate 200 times faster than many mainframes at that time. Directors of the Center: * William McCurdy, Ph.D., OSC Acting Director, 1986–87 * Charles Bender, Ph.D., OSC Executive Director, 1987-2002 * Al Stutz, OSC Acting Director, 2001 * Russell Pitzer, Ph.D., OSC Interim Director, 2001-2003 * Stanley Ahalt, Ph.D., OSC Executive Director, 2003-2009 * Ashok Krishnamurthy, Ph.D., OSC Interim Co-executive Director, 2009-2012 * Steven Gordon, Ph.D., OSC Interim Co-executive Director, 2009-2012 * Pankaj Shah, OSC Executive Director, 2012-2015 * David Hudak, Ph.D., OSC Interim Executive Director, 2015-2018, Executive Director 2018-

Systems

'
Production systems
(Mar. 2022) include: * Pitzer Cluster (installed 2019): A 10,240-core Dell Intel Gold 6148 machine + 19,104-core Dual Intel Xeon 8268 machine :* 224 nodes have 40 cores per node and 192 GB of memory per node :* 340 nodes have 48 cores per node and 192 GB of memory per node :* 32 nodes have 40 cores, 384 GB of memory, and 2 NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs :* 42 nodes have 48 cores, 384 GB of memory, and 2 NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs :* 4 nodes have 48 cores, 768 GB of memory, and 4 NVIDIA Volta V100s w/32GB GPU memory and NVLink :* 4 nodes have 80 cores and 3.0 TB of memory for large Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) style jobs :* Theoretical system peak performance of 3940 teraflops (CPU only) * Owens Cluster (installed 2016): A 23,392-core Dell Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 machine :* 648 nodes have 28 cores per node and 128 GB of memory per node :* 16 nodes have 48 cores and 1.5 TB of memory for large Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) style jobs :* 160 nodes have 28 cores, 128 GB or memory, and 1 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU :* Theoretical system peak performance 750 teraflops (CPU only)
Storage Systems
:* 5.3 Petabytes of storage :* 5.5 Petabytes of tape backup

References

External links

Ohio Supercomputer Center website

Ohio Technology Consortium website
{{authority control Information technology organizations based in North America Buildings and structures in Columbus, Ohio Science and technology in the United States Supercomputer sites Supercomputers