COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 10 — More than ever, academic and manufacturing researchers from across Ohio are turning to the high performance computing power offered by the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). On Thursday, an abundance of that research was on display at OSC’s semi-annual Statewide Users Group (SUG) meeting.

Attendees shared and gained insight into topics ranging from auto safety and dark matter to gene flow and a myriad of chemistry-related topics. They also heard two keynote addresses, and the competition portion of the meeting featured 27 posters and 12 flash talks.

OSC staff delivered presentations on its soon-to-be-deployed Owens Cluster, which will be the most powerful supercomputer in the history of the center, and the recently launched OnDemand3 web portal, a vastly upgraded version of OSC’s one-stop shop for access to high performance computing services.

SUG is a volunteer group composed of the scientists and engineers who provide OSC’s executive director with program and policy advice and direction to ensure a productive environment for research. SUG was instituted in 1986, a year prior to the creation of OSC, to advise administrators and policy makers on their planning and acquisition activities for the Center. Thursday’s SUG meeting was the fourth one in a row to feature the poster and flash talk competitions.

“We’ve continued to see growth every year since we switched to this format, and we’re really excited about that,” said Brian Guilfoos, HPC client services manager at OSC. “There are a lot of people coming here to show their work, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for that. The ability to be able see what our users are doing with the services is great because that really is the most important part of what we do.”

The keynote addresses featured OSC users from both the industrial and academic worlds. Duane Detwiler, chief engineer of vehicle research and manager of the strategic research department at Honda R&D Americas Inc., presented on computer-aided engineering for lightweight vehicle development. His address was followed by Alexey T. Zayak, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Bowling Green State University, who spoke about the computational angle of vibrational spectroscopy of heterogeneous chemical interfaces.

After the keynote addresses, four winners were crowned for their flash talks and poster submissions. Winners claimed 5,000 resource units of time on OSC systems.

Ohio State’s Stephanie Kim and Sean Marguet tied for first place in the poster competition, while Ohio University’s Tomas Rojas won the chemistry flash talk competition and Aaron Wilson, from Ohio State, won the non-chemistry portion of the flash talks.

Kim’s poster was titled “Novel Binding Site of Cyclin A2 and Potential Inhibitors.” Marguet’s poster was titled “Computationally Guided Resonance Raman Spectroscopy of Nickel-Substituted Rubredoxin, A Model Hydrogenase Enzyme.”

In the flash talk competition, Wilson won for the second-straight meeting. His flash talk discussed “Pushing the Next-Generation Arctic System Reanalysis to the Human Scale,” while Solorazano’s chemistry flash talk was on “Strain Fields and Electronic Structure of CrN.”

The next SUG meeting is scheduled for early April.

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About the Ohio Supercomputer Center

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Board of Regents, addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the vital resources essential to make extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required to secure 21st century jobs. For more, visit www.osc.edu.

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Source: OSC