OSC

Since 1987, OSC has been 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.

Research. A staff of 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.

Cyberinfrastructure. The Ohio Supercomputer Center’s cyberinfrastructure and software development researchers provide the user community with various high performance computing software options. This variety enables researchers to select parallel computing languages they most prefer, and just as important, it creates a test bed for exploring these systems. By taking a holistic approach to generating efficient supercomputing applications for researchers, the Center’s cyberinfrastructure and software development research capitalizes on all the components within the cycle of innovation — development, experimentation, and analysis - and continuously improves the services provided.

Ohio Supercomputer Center Reorganizes to Better Meet Demands, Seize Opportunities

 

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) announced a repositioning of its organizational structure and management to better serve evolving customer and infrastructure requirements.

The move follows recommendations from advisory groups and last year’s strategic planning process to quickly adapt existing and future services and initiatives to the needs of a growing customer base.

OSC Aids Ohio State Chemists in Determining Nature of Ice

Chemists at The Ohio State University and their colleagues may have settled a 70-year-old scientific debate on the fundamental nature of ice.

A new statistical analysis mechanical theory has confirmed what some scientists only suspected before: that under the right conditions, molecules of water can freeze together in just the right way to form a perfect crystal. And once frozen, that ice can be manipulated by electric fields in the same way that magnets respond to magnetic fields.

Joint Project will give Ohio Higher Education New Edge in Access to and Delivery of Electronic Information and Data

A new project now underway will provide Ohio's public college nd university students and faculty, a growing number of the state's private colleges, and the State Library of Ohio with instantaneous electronic access to a range of valuable materials, information and data which are currently hard-to-find and/or available in non-circulating form only.

Federal Spending Bill Funds Third Frontier Network Initiatives

The fiscal year 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, approved earlier by Congress and signed into law last week by President Bush, directs $5.1 million in federal funds to the Ohio Board of Regents to make Ohio the world’s leader in using state-of-the-art computer networking to improve education, research and medical care.

The federal funds support new initiatives that will take advantage of Ohio’s 1,600-mile Third Frontier Network, the most advanced state-wide computer network in the nation.

OSC Networking Announces Additional Connectivity Via MCI Telecommunications

In mid-February, OSC Networking and MCI Telecommunications completed the installation and testing of OSC Networking's expanded gateway service to the Internet. The new service establishes connections between OSC Networking and internetMCI Direct Connect Access. As a result of this new service, OSC Networking, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, now maintains a total of 10.5Mbps total gateway throughput to the Internet through three different diverse paths.

OSC Purchases Intel Pentium 4 Cluster to Update Systems

OSC is updating its hardware with an Intel Pentium 4 (P4) cluster to be installed later this month. Replacing the AMD Athlon cluster, the P4 doubles the current system’s power with a sizable increase in speed.

With a theoretical peak of 2,457 gigaflops, the P4 cluster contains 256 dual-processor Pentium IV Xeon systems with four gigabytes of memory per node and 20 terabytes of aggregate disk space. It will be connected via a gigabit Ethernet and use Voltair InfiniBand 4x HCA, and a Voltair ISR 9600 InfiniBand switch router for high-speed interconnect.

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