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Letter from the Executive Director

Pankaj.jpgFor more than 25 years, Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has nurtured its users with a powerful resource for accelerating discovery. The research featured on these pages provides a small snapshot of some of Ohio’s most innovative, and potentially life-changing, studies.

Nationally, the center continues to support the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) as one of the 17 partner organizations. An initiative of the National Science Foundation, XSEDE serves as the foundation for a national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem; it’s a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center is proud to have three people involved in XSEDE leadership: Steve Gordon, Ph.D., senior education specialist, serves as education lead, senior researcher Karen Tomko, Ph.D., serves as a resource for Ohio researchers as a Campus Champion, and Dave Hudak, Ph.D., program director for cyberinfrastructure and software development, was recently named manager for XSEDE Industry Relations.

Our industrial engagement collaborations are expanding, too. OSC and our industry project partners received a multi-million dollar grant from the Ohio Third Frontier Commission to develop web-based “manufacturing apps.” The initiative, named AweSim, is being led by OSC’s Alan Chalker, Ph.D. You can read more about AweSim on page 6.

As an organization, we continually strive to provide the most powerful and appropriate supercomputing architecture for our researchers. This includes research collaborations, such as those with Intel on
the Xeon Phi processing chips, as well as ongoing systems improvements led by our chief systems architect, Doug Johnson.

As a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium, a division of the Ohio Board of Regents, OSC works closely with our consortium partners to provide a seamless foundation for Ohio’s innovation efforts. In particular, the Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet) provides a 100 Gigabit-per-second network that ensures researchers have the ability to seamlessly collaborate with others around the world.

We believe that technology, whether supercomputers or networking, should be transparent. The differential should be – and, as highlighted on these pages, definitely is – the people: our staff members and our researchers.


Pankaj Shah
Executive Director
Ohio Supercomputer Center and OARnet