In the late 1980s, the OSU Department of Statistics decided to use a single centralized compute system manufactured by the Pyramid corporation which all department users could access. Gradually this single machine was replaced by a set of individual, faculty-specific, workstations. Finally, the individual computers were replaced by a pooled collection of high-performance LINUX workstations, called “UNITY”, and obtained from the departments comprising the College of the Arts and Sciences.
By the mid 2000s, the Statistics Department had the exclusive use of 25 nodes from UNITY. On the software side of the Statistics Department’s computing tools, the Department supported individual MacOS, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise (Linux) machines. Higher intensity jobs have been available from the Ohio Supercomputer Center's resources.
As of 2024, Statistics faculty and graduate students have a cadre of support staff familiar both with high-level computing languages as well as with the collaborative nature of Statistical research. Some examples of OSU-provided technology services are networking, email, a course management system, cloud file sharing/storage, classrooms with projection systems and smart podiums, and extensive library services. The computing staff that services the Department of Statistics and the College of the Arts and Sciences have roughly 70 staff who provide broader assistance in research computing, computer labs, Ohio State’s courseware system, tablet computers for interactive lecture capture, video conferencing, and general systems administration.
The Department works with the university to ensure needed research and teaching software are available on a site-licensed basis to faculty, staff and students, both on and off the campus. As of 2024, the list of software available through OSU includes R, Rstudio, Matlab, Mathematica, Minitab, SAS, JMP, SPSS and Microsoft 365.