Ohio Supercomputer Center Expands Ascend Cluster for AI and Medical Research

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has expanded its Ascend cluster, enhancing access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI, machine learning, and medical research. The upgraded system, now featuring ~16 petaflops of computing power with 776 GPUs and 40,448 cores, offers eight times the capacity of the previous system launched in 2022.

This expansion was facilitated through collaboration with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and the College of Medicine, allowing affiliated faculty and students to utilize the resources at no cost. The new configuration includes 322 Dell nodes, with various combinations of AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

The improvements are expected to significantly benefit biomedical research by reducing computation times and costs compared to cloud resources. This upgrade follows the recent launch of the Cardinal cluster, aimed at addressing the rising demand for high-performance computing in Ohio.