COLUMBUS – January 18, 2010 – Last month, the Electroscience Laboratory (ESL) at The Ohio State University celebrated the groundbreaking of a new facility on Kinnear Road that will showcase the center’s unique, cutting-edge research. Just down the street, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) last summer installed a $4 million expansion to its flagship computing system, providing a huge boost to the state’s research and innovation aspirations.
Taking advantage of the fortuitous timing of these two developments, leaders at the two research organizations recently announced their agreement to collaborate in developing parallel software codes for computational electromagnetics (CEM), especially for layered sensing research.
Under the agreement, ESL faculty and researchers, who develop novel computational approaches to enable the design of future radar, imaging and sensor systems, will work with OSC. OSC staff will assist in porting the CEM codes to various high performance computing platforms, including emerging architectures such as GPGPU.
“This collaboration is timely and critical to realizing the potential of wideband wireless communication systems, sensor networks and imaging approaches,” said Prof. John Volakis, director of ESL. “ESL has an ambitious plan to enable portable medical imaging devices for remote health care, and OSC’s experience is valuable in designing and testing the proposed platforms.”
The ESL is a major center of excellence within OSU’s College of Engineering and one of the largest Radio Frequency research laboratories in the world, focusing its efforts on all aspects of wireless communications. ESL’s research enables high data-rate communications so that real-time images and data can be shared through wireless networks. Being able to evaluate the connectivity of a satellite, airborne platform or ground vehicle requires large-scale computing.
“OSC has significant expertise in the parallelization of software codes for efficient execution on a variety of high performance computing platforms,” notes Ashok Krishnamurthy, Ph.D., OSC interim co-executive director. “OSC also has expertise in the porting of software codes to hybrid computing platforms and additional expertise in the development of web-based portals for computational science and engineering applications.”
OSC’s IBM Cluster 1350 supercomputer, Glenn, was launched in 2008 and significantly expanded in 2009 to address biosciences and other research areas targeted by the state. The system, with 9,500 cores and 24 Terabytes of memory, offers researchers peak computational capability of 75 Teraflops.