At Wright State University, faculty and students are using the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) to support hands-on coursework and data-driven research across campus.
For Mike VanHorn, Wright State’s campus champion for OSC, connecting users with these resources is a central part of his role. As senior computer systems administrator in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, VanHorn works closely with faculty and students while also helping expand awareness of OSC across campus.
“As a campus champion, it’s my duty to serve as a local proponent for access and utilization of OSC resources on Wright State’s campuses,” VanHorn said. “In practice, that means I try to direct Wright State’s faculty and students toward OSC whenever I see an opportunity for their work to be done more efficiently.”
In the classroom, OSC gives students access to computing resources at a scale beyond what is available locally. In computer science and engineering courses, students write and submit parallel programs, test their code and debug their work. Through this, they gain hands-on experience using tools commonly used in research and industry.
While Wright State maintains its own computing resources for instruction, those systems are designed for smaller-scale use. OSC provides access to significantly larger computing power, allowing students to run more complex jobs and work with datasets that would be difficult to handle locally, all within an environment that mirrors real-world research computing.
“Exposing our students to large-scale and leading-edge resources really gives them the perspective they need going forward,” VanHorn said. “It helps them understand the kinds of problems they’ll be able to solve using high-performance computing.”
