Our Mission
At the Ohio Supercomputer Center, our mission is to empower Ohio higher educational institutions, both public and private, as well as private industry, by providing capable, accessible, reliable and secure computational services enhanced by training, consulting and research partnership.
Our Strategic Vision
The Ohio Supercomputer Center’s vision is to be a catalyst to position Ohio’s higher educational institutions and companies as world leaders with a computationally enabled workforce and research endeavors.
Our Tag Line
Empower. Partner. Lead.
Value Proposition
To the State of Ohio, and its Higher Educational Institutions and Companies
By leading Ohio’s strategy regarding high performance computational services via the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), Ohio leverages significant economies of scale resulting in better services and cost savings.
Economies of scale are achieved by leveraging common IT infrastructure investments across millions of individual components, resulting in lower marginal per unit costs. In addition, since many clients have fluctuating computational needs, aggregating usage into a single large service provider allows for greater overall utilization, providing flexibility to scale up as needs dictate.
Better services include broadly available large scale computational and storage resources, as well as specialized items such as a comprehensive set of software, advanced technical support, extensive documentation and training, as well as research partnership. Cost savings are realized by avoiding replicated services, while still empowering campuses to provide complementary local services. Underlying both are industry best practices regarding cybersecurity, reliability and disaster resilience.
To Clients
Ohio is leading the effort toward building a digital society. To this end, OSC provides assistance and lowers barriers to access, enabling a wider range of communities to access cyberinfrastructure capabilities. OSC’s services can be used by and benefit nearly every Ohioan, such as:
- University students and faculty, who need advanced computing for research and teaching but do not want to become IT experts that deploy and maintain complex computer systems.
- Industry researchers and business owners, who want to be more competitive but cannot justify the significant expenses of operating their own supercomputers.
- K-12 students, teachers and administrators, who want to motivate their STEM educational pursuits but do not have access to advanced computational programs.
Services and Expertise
Computational services OSC offers include:
- High-performance research computing compliant with various cybersecurity related mandates and regulations.
- Large capacity data storage, including data curation, publication, and archiving, to help promote scientific reproducibility and public transparency.
- Actively maintained and supported scientific software packages that ensure clients can use OSC’s resources productively.
- Technical education and expertise in the form of workshops, classes, and web-based training and materials, as well as processes and tools for university faculty to incorporate cyberinfrastructure resources into courses.
- Deep expertise in developing and deploying software and web interfaces that run efficiently on powerful supercomputers.
Our History
The Ohio Supercomputer Center was established by an act of the Ohio General Assembly in 1987 as a statewide resource designated to place Ohio's research universities and private industry at the forefront of computational research. Oversight of OSC was delegated to the Ohio Board of Regents, now the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE), which subsequently reached an agreement with The Ohio State University to house OSC and act as its fiscal and legal agent.
Since 2000, OSC has had an agreement with the Ohio Department of Administrative Services to house OSC equipment at the State of Ohio Computer Center. In 2011, the Chancellor of the ODHE created The Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH) to function as an umbrella organization for several statewide technology infrastructure organizations that support higher education, including OSC.
OSC has been designated by the Ohio General Assembly as a technology-based economic development entity, and in that capacity regularly works with the Ohio Department of Development and JobsOhio.
A detailed history of OSC can be found at our 25th anniversary page
