Ohio Supercomputer Center
Established in 1987, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is a partner of Ohio universities and industries, providing researchers with high performance computing, advanced cyberinfrastructure, research and computational science education services.
OSC is an organizational member of the Ohio Board of Regents’ Ohio Technology Consortium[1] and 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 of research identified by the state to be well positioned for growth and success: biosciences, advanced materials and energy/environment.
Prominent program areas at OSC currently include:
- AweSim industrial engagement program
- Ralph Regula School of Computational Science
- Virtual Environments and Simulation program
OSC is funded through the Ohio Board of Regents by the state operating and capital budgets of the Ohio General Assembly. OSC offices are located on the West Campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, United States.
History
OSC was established by the Ohio Board of Regents 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 — 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, 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 through Summer Institute and 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.[2] 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-
Systems
Production systems (Feb. 2014) include:
- Ruby Cluster (installed 2014)
- 4,800 total cores
- Intel Xeon E5 2670 V2 (Ivy Bridge) CPUs
- One node has 32 cores (Intel Xeon E5 4640 CPUs), 1 TB of memory, 483 GB of local disk space
- Oakley Cluster (installed 2012)
- 8,300+ core HP Intel Xeon machine
- One in every 10 nodes has 2 Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators
- One node has 1 TB of RAM and 32 cores, for large SMP style jobs
- Glenn Cluster (installed 2009)
- 5,300+ core IBM AMD Opteron machine
- Storage
- 2+ Petabytes of storage
- 2 Petabytes of tape backup
References
- ↑ Petro, Jim. "Chancellor Petro Announces Creation of Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH) Share". Retrieved 13 February 2014.
- ↑ Hunt, Spencer. "Ohio Supercomputer Center still evolving". Columbus Dispatch. Retrieved 13 February 2014.
External links
- Ohio Supercomputer Center website
- Ralph Regula School website
- AweSim industrial engagement website
- Ohio Technology Consortium website
Coordinates: 40°00′00″N 83°02′24″W / 40.000000°N 83.040000°W