What is the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)?

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is a division of the Ohio Department of Higher Education that provides high-performance computing (HPC), research data storage, and related research computing services to researchers, students, and businesses. It is relevant to you if you need large-scale compute, data storage, AI/ML infrastructure, or software development support for research or teaching, and you are affiliated with an Ohio institution or otherwise eligible for an OSC account.

What OSC provides

OSC organizes its services around several core areas:

• Cluster computing — high-performance computing resources for simulation, modeling, and data-intensive workloads.
• Research data storage — storage services designed for research data.
• Education — programs and resources that support teaching and hands-on coursework.
• Web and software development — including research software engineering.
• Artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning — services in the AI/ML space.
• Gateways and facilitation — support for science gateways and helping users get started.
• Protected data service — for work involving protected data.
• Security, accessibility, and policies — the governance and compliance side of using OSC.

Who it serves

OSC's homepage is organized around three audiences:

How universities use OSC

OSC works directly with colleges and universities across Ohio. Two examples from OSC's own reporting:

• At Wright State University, faculty and students use OSC to support hands-on coursework and data-driven research. Mike VanHorn, the campus's OSC Campus Champion and a senior computer systems administrator in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, connects users with OSC resources and helps expand awareness across campus.
• At Youngstown State University, Professor Feng (George) Yu brought students to OSC's 2026 Research Symposium to present work in quantum computing and blockchain technologies developed with OSC resources.

The Campus Champions program is one of the main ways OSC reaches individual campuses: champions like VanHorn act as local points of contact who help faculty and students find and use OSC services.

Getting started

If you want to use OSC, the practical entry points are:

1. Get an OSC account — account access is the prerequisite for using compute and storage resources.
2. Check service costs — OSC publishes service cost information, so confirm what applies to your use case before committing.
3. Use the System Gateway / Client Portal — these are the interfaces for accessing systems and managing your work.
4. Check system status and usage metrics — useful for planning around outages or capacity.
5. Contact client support — for help requests, or use the sales contact for business inquiries.

OSC also maintains a Getting Started section, software listings, and technical support resources, plus facilitation services if you need help porting or scaling your work.

When OSC is the right fit

OSC is a reasonable choice if you are a researcher, student, or business in or connected to Ohio and you need computing power or storage beyond what a laptop or departmental server provides — for example, running simulations, training machine learning models, or handling large research datasets. If your work involves protected data, OSC has a dedicated protected data service, but you should verify policy and security requirements through OSC's security and policies documentation before assuming it meets your compliance needs.

For research groups, OSC also supports proposal partnerships and research collaborations, and publishes annual research reports — useful if you need to cite OSC in a grant or demonstrate institutional support.