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About the Ohio Supercomputer Center

Our Mission

At the Ohio Supercomputer Center, our duty is to empower our clients, partner strategically to develop new research and business opportunities, and lead Ohio's knowledge economy.

  • Empower. We promote and stimulate computational research and education, serving as a key enabler for the state to achieve its aspirations in advanced technology, information systems, and advanced industries.
  • Partner. We are a catalytic partner with Ohio universities and industries, enabling Ohio to compete for international, federal, and state funding and focus on new research and business opportunities.
  • Lead. We provide an innovative high-performance computing and high-performance networking infrastructure for a diverse statewide/regional community including education, academic research, industry, and state government.

What We Do

2007 marks the 20th anniversary of providing our clients services in four areas, or functions:

  • Supercomputing. OSC provides the computational power and storage that scientists need to meet their research goals.  Whether researchers need to harness the incredible power of a parallel processor cluster to better understand deep space, a vector processor machine to do weather modeling, or a mid-size shared memory processor system to model the human heart, OSC has the hardware and software solutions to meet their needs.
  • Networking. OSC provides more than 1,600 miles of backbone network to our extended base of clients, from K-12 to colleges, hospitals to public broadcasting. Beyond providing massive and scalable bandwidth, we specialize in providing custom solutions to fit the client's individual needs, whether bridging 20 international sites to a videoconference or assisting a client at 2 a.m. via our 24/7 Network Operations Center.
  • Research. A staff of more than 30 high performance computing and networking research experts maintain active research programs in HPC and Networking, Homeland Security and Defense, Environmental Sciences, Engineering and Life Sciences. Our goals are to lead science and engineering research efforts, assist researchers with custom needs and collaborate with regional, national and international researchers in groundbreaking initiatives.
  • Education. OSC has a national reputation for its training and education programs. Staff teach faculty and student researchers through scientific computing workshops, one-on-one classes, and web-based portal training. Ohio students gain exposure to the world of high performance computing and networking during our annual summer institutes for young women in middle school and for junior and senior high school students. And, the statewide, virtual Ralph Regula School of Computational Science coordinates computational science and engineering education activities for all levels of learning.

Our Affiliations

OSC and its staff members are active at the executive level or on committees with a variety of organizations, including:

  • American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC), an international consortium of state and land grant institutions providing economic distance education programs and services via the latest and most appropriate information technologies.
  • Blue Waters petascale computing system will revolutionize science and engineering research and education.
  • Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC), which conducts collaborative scientific investigations that require the power of high performance computers and the efficiency of modern computational methods.
  • Council on Competitiveness, the only group of corporate CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders committed to the future prosperity of all Americans and enhanced U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.
  • Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC), a collaboration led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Boston University that builds human capacity by creating awareness of the opportunities afforded through cyberinfrastructure and by educating and training a diverse group of people in all stages of life, from K-12 to professional practice, to fully participate in the cyberinfrastructure community as developers, users, and leaders.
  • Gelato Federation, a global technical community dedicated to advancing Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® platform through collaboration, education, and leadership
  • Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, a collaboration among colleges, universities, national research laboratories, and other educational institutions. The consortium facilitates the widespread and effective use of petascale computing, through the development of new computing software, applications, and technologies.
  • Internet 2, the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium, brings the U.S. research and academic community together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community to undertake collaborative efforts that have a fundamental impact on tomorrow's Internet.
  • National LambdaRail, an initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications.
  • StateNets, comprised of public and not-for-profit organizations whose professionals operate the statewide networks that serve a substantial portion of our states' K-20 education and library institutions.
  • The Quilt, a coalition of advanced regional network organizations, whose goal is to influence the national agenda on information technology infrastructure, with particular emphasis on networking. Through this coalition, the Quilt promotes delivery of networking services at lower cost, higher performance and greater reliability and security.

Our History

2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the Ohio Supercomputer Center, where we continue to build on our rich history of innovation and service.

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.

Today, OSC is a fully scalable center with mid-range machines to match those found at the NSF centers and national labs.

Also in 1987, the OSC networking initiative provided the first network access to OSC's first Cray supercomputer. At the time, network access was available only within Columbus boundaries.

OSC Networking now provides Internet access to 88 Ohio higher education institutions and two million Ohioans. Since its founding, OSC Networking backbone usage has grown more than 100 percent per year.

During its first ten years, OSC focused primarily on providing high quality computing and networking services to its users. Recently, OSC has expanded its role to provide services to national high performance computing and networking groups with extensive research and education resources.

But OSC's real history -- and future -- is its clients.

As a leader in computing and networking, OSC is a resource for Ohio's scientists and engineers. The Statewide Users Group (SUG), composed of faculty members from colleges and universities across Ohio, guides OSC's user-related and technical operations. OSC Networking's Steering Committee, OSTEER, provides support from participating Ohio universities to ensure that its policies and financial structure are consistent with member needs. The Research Advisory Committee and Production Advisory committees were established in 2004, expanding the representation at OSC to include industrial and research organizations.

Past or present, computing or networking, OSC is an innovator and leader for our technology-based world. OSC's research and development initiatives put the Ohio in the position of education and technology state of the future.