More than 10 times as powerful as OSU’s previous supercomputer, Cimarron will help researchers across Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas tackle complex challenges in aerospace, agriculture, healthcare and artificial intelligence

The new Cimarron supercomputer is officially online.

It boasts 250 compute nodes, nearly 400 total GPUs, more than 200,000 gigabytes of RAM and about 10 petabytes of storage. It is more than 10 times as powerful as OSU’s other supercomputer.

“But you know what makes Cimarron really exciting? It's not those numbers. It's what researchers can do with those numbers,” said Dr. Kenneth W. Sewell, OSU vice president for research.

“Cimarron can help us fly safer aircraft and autonomous systems, discover new materials, understand complex energy systems, model severe weather and change to climate, use artificial intelligence to solve problems we could barely even contemplate a generation ago, accelerate genomics and biomedical discoveries, help us understand and treat human and animal diseases, and allow agricultural researchers to model crops, soils, water, genetics and entire food systems,” he said.

The name “Cimarron” comes from the river that feeds Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas. Institutions across that “OAK” region have access to this tool.

“That means bringing together the research expertise across institutions and disciplines, giving researchers access to computational capabilities that might otherwise be out of reach,” Sewell said.

This kind of supercomputer access is what attracted Dr. Chris Fennell to OSU to begin with in 2013. He now serves as director of OSU’s High Performance Computing Center, ushering in this new era with Cimarron.

“When it comes to the work of the High Performance Computing Center, it’s really about getting the students involved with faculty members using these resources and understanding: Here I can enhance my research production and increase the depth of the story by using the computing resources,” Fennell said.

The hardware for Cimarron was funded in large part by a $4 million grant by the National Science Foundation awarded in 2022 — one of the largest Major Research Instrumentation grants it’s ever awarded. In the years since the project began, Fennell said hardware prices have skyrocketed as demand from new data centers has limited supplies.

“Luckily we were on the list early,” Fennell said. “RAM is five or 10 times more expensive right now and you can’t actually get hardware like this right now. It’s essentially impossible.”

The OSU HPCC team is ready to set up accounts for OAK researchers who want to use the supercomputer.

“A lot of onboarding, getting people settled into the new changes we have,” said Kellen Bullock, an operations team member. “We have a lot more resources, and we are ready to serve the community.”

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