Ohio Supercomputer Center

Established in 1987, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) partners with Ohio universities, labs and industries, providing students and researchers with high performance computing, advanced cyberinfrastructure, research and computational science education services.

OSC offices on Kinnear Road in Columbus.

OSC is member-organization of the Ohio Technology Consortium,[1] 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 of 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. 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 (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 — 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, 2012-2015
  • David Hudak, Ph.D., OSC Interim Executive Director, 2015-2018, Executive Director 2018-

Systems

Production systems (Aug. 2019) include:

  • Pitzer Cluster (installed 2019): A 10,240-core Dell Intel Gold 6148 machine
  • 216 nodes have 40 cores per node and 192 GB of memory per node
  • 4 nodes have 80 cores, 3.0 TB of memory, for large Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) style jobs
  • 32 nodes have 40 cores, 384 GB of memory, and 2 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs
  • Theoretical system peak performance 720 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
  • 160 nodes have 28 cores, 128 GB or memory, and 1 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU
  • Theoretical system peak performance 750 teraflops (CPU only)
  • Ruby Cluster (installed 2014): A 4,800-core HP Intel Xeon machine
  • 20 cores per node and 64GB of memory per node
  • One node has 1 TB of memory and 32 cores, for large SMP style jobs
  • 20 nodes have NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPUs
  • 5.3 Petabytes of storage
  • 5.5 Petabytes of tape backup

References
  1. Petro, Jim. "Chancellor Petro Announces Creation of Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH) Share". Retrieved 13 February 2014.
  2. Hunt, Spencer. "Ohio Supercomputer Center still evolving". Columbus Dispatch. Retrieved 13 February 2014.

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