TDAI has retained a variety of computing resources for use by institute core faculty, labs in residence, recipients of Core Faculty Catalyst and pilot awards, and other institute-sponsored projects. TDAI Research Data Scientist Dr. Alex Davis is available to consult with core faculty and research pilot investigators to discuss project requirements.
Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)
OSC provides computational resources, storage, network access, and cyberinfrastructure in the form of various high performance computing packages. TDAI is able to provide access through an OSC Campus Champions code, for projects that may be too small or early in their development cycle to qualify for a project code, or with a separately assigned project code. Project codes are of bounded duration and funding, based on the needs of the project.
TDAI core faculty and other researchers leading institute-sponsored projects are asked to provide an estimate of usage to TDAI. Estimates should include:
- Estimated number of core hours needed
- Estimated number of GPU compute hours needed
- Amount of storage required
For TDAI pilot and Catalyst awards, an aggregate of the estimates is used to ensure sufficient resources are available for all projects. TDAI periodically audits usage by the projects it funds at OSC to ensure resources remain available. If a project exceeds the estimated usage, its needs and scope can be revisited.
Note: Papers, posters or other publications that result from projects utilizing TDAI-sponsored access to OSC should recognize support by both OSC and TDAI (OSC citation guide: https://www.osc.edu/resources/getting_started/citation).
Commercial Cloud Services: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure
TDAI has accounts with both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure through partnerships with the OCIO and the providers that are handled administratively by TDAI and may be used to supplement or in place of physical compute and storage resources.
AWS and Azure have similar offerings for their cloud platforms, including CPU and GPU compute services, storage and networking, as well as software solutions in the form of databases, preconfigured server platforms and more. Note that not all products are available for use dependent on Ohio State policies and not all data can be stored using all services.
For both AWS and Azure accounts, a budget amount has been set via the university's procurement processes, with the available budget shared among all users of the cloud service. Users must keep in mind budget constraints when using the service; TDAI staff can help determine the availability of these resources.