Charge and Purpose
From mid-2023 through the fall of 2024, a 12-member task force, chaired by Distinguished Professor Todd Palmer and comprised primarily of faculty, reviewed OSU’s research computing organizational model and compared OSU to 13 peer universities. Their review revealed a trend toward centralization to increase success with larger research opportunities, and based on their review, the task force made eight recommendations, all adopted by OSU.
Through the creation of the Research Computing Office and some early investments, the university has already acted on those recommendations and will continue to make additional progress, as shown in the list below of some of the RCO’s early achievements, ongoing and planned activities.
Recommendations
OSU should embrace a centrally-coordinated model for research computing.
Activities thus far
This recommendation has been followed through the creation of the Research Computing Office.
This centrally-coordinated model should accommodate some diversity of computing modalities.
RCO is supporting this diversity by increasing coordination of the university’s compute clusters to improve access to CPU-based computing resources for high-performance and high-throughput computing and by expanding access to GPU-based computing methods through procurement of the Huang Complex supercomputer and coordination of existing NVIDIA servers.
All research-engaged faculty and staff should have access to a minimum computing and storage allocation.
RCO is providing a basic CPU computing resource pool and a basic amount of research storage that any research active faculty or staff can use. Through the Huang Complex supercomputer, the RCO will also provide basic access to several open source large language models (LLMs) and a baseline amount of GPU capacity.
The future research computing model should include research computing facilitators and research software engineers.
The first research software engineer was hired in Fiscal Year 2024-25, and the RCO’s FY25-26 budget includes funds for additional staff to support researchers’ use of the Huang Complex supercomputer, facilitate access to research computing resources, assist with research software engineering, and more.
Discipline-specific expertise should be embedded into specific units and colleges.
The RCO’s first research software engineer is a joint staff person between CEOAS and the RCO who has expertise in CUDA and CUDA-X programming, especially beneficial for applications of accelerated GPU supercomputing. Additional hires of support staff will be split or embedded into colleges depending on their disciplinary focus.
A multi-faceted approach is needed for governance and policymaking.
RCO reports to Irem Tumer, Vice President for Research and Innovation, and Andrea Ballinger, CIO and Vice Provost for University Information and Technology. The RCO Executive Committee includes representatives from multiple colleges, the Budget Office, the Office of the Provost, and the Huang Complex Executive Director. The RCO will also have an advisory group of technical research computing experts, the Research Computing Working Group.
A detailed process should develop a phased plan for the implementation of the centrally coordinated operating model starting in 2025.
Starting in the Fall of 2024 and through Spring 2025, the Research Computing Working Group developed this phased plan in the form of a series of recommendations to the Executive Committee, resulting in the RCO launch.
OSU should build strong collaborative relationships with other state universities and Oregon companies.
OSU has entered collaborative relationships with research computing organizations in alignment with this recommendation. OSU is a member of the national peer organization for research computing, the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC). It has helped establish a community of research computing groups at Oregon’s research universities that through a recent 2025 NSF grant is now developing a regional cyber infrastructure plan for Oregon. Inter-university collaborations and sharing of research computing resources is also a core part of many recent proposals for large-scale research and innovation projects, such as FAST and Mass Timber.
Research Computing 2030 Task Force (2023 – 2024)
Todd S. Palmer (chair), University Distinguished Professor, Nuclear Science and Engineering, College of Engineering
Kyle Niemeyer Associate Professor, Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, College of Engineering
Brent Kronmiller Interim Director, Center for Quantitative Life Sciences
Jessica Garwood Assistant Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
James Lerczak Professor and Associate Dean for Research, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Taal Levi Associate Professor, Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences, College of Agricultural Sciences
Benjamin Dalziel Associate Professor, Mathematics and Integrative Biology, College of Science
Evan Forsythe Assistant Professor, Integrative Biology, College of Science
Stefan Lee Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering
Bogdan Strimbu Associate Professor, Forest Engineering, Resources and Management, College of Forestry
Mark Keever Executive Director, Digital Research Infrastructure, University Information and Technology
Anthony Koppers Associate Vice President for Research Advancement and Strategy, Division of Research and Innovation