Ten servers found a new home at Oregon State University
Computing for Humanity gifts $46,000 CAD worth of servers to the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.
In previous articles, we mentioned that Computing for Humanity was seeking to reallocate 108 super servers generously donated by Schrodinger to our charity. Our goal has been to find institutions where this equipment can be utilized effectively for research, rather than allowing it to end up as e-waste in landfills.
During our extensive search to find a suitable home for these powerful servers, we connected with Chris Sullivan, the Director of Research and Academic Computing at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Sullivan has a strong interest in understanding how human interactions with the planet impact the environment. Upon learning that Computing for Humanity was looking for hosts for these servers, he enthusiastically supported the idea of giving this equipment a second chance.
Over the course of nearly seven months, Sullivan and the Computing for Humanity team collaborated to arrange the delivery of ten Supermicro servers, each equipped with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz, from Ohio to Oregon. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed to formalize the scope of the donation, which transferred ownership of the hardware to Oregon State University for their exclusive use.
Servers that now are supporting science on the West Coast of the United States
In academic research, securing financial resources is always a challenge. Sullivan applied for a grant to cover shipping costs, and once he received it, the next step was to coordinate the logistics. This task was handled by Champagne Logistics, an excellent partner dedicated to picking up the servers from the data center of our other partner, ThinkOn. As a result, 10 servers were transported from the East Coast in mid-December 2024 and arrived on the West Coast during the first week of January 2025.
The day of the delivery, Sullivan was in meetings in his office when the stuff showed up. “By the time I got out there my SA and the students had the machines out of the boxes, installed in racks, boxes broken down and recycled and new drives and memory being installed into the machine followed test installations of operating systems. All in about 3 hours. We are adding memory and drives to the machines and the students are very excited to use them for the research work in the labs”, Sullivan said.
Student working on installing drives instead of coding to help get these online quickly
“We have many students working in labs helping use AI based tools on these projects leveraging GPUs”, Sullivan said. “The students are impatient waiting for resources on the cluster and are very excited to leverage these machines”. Some projects that will run on the gear donated are related to:
How telecom cables and gasoline emissions raise environmental lead levels.
How low-oxygen waters off West coasts risk becoming large “Dead Zones”; and,
Studies on the interactions between local and basin-scale physical drivers of copepod communities and how those same processes affect the larval dispersal and population connectivity of benthic crustaceans (e.g. crabs).
Dead zones occur when dissolved oxygen levels drop so low that crabs and other bottom-dwelling fish perish
Computing for Humanity’mission ensures technology lives the longest most impactful life span even after its primary usage is complete.
“Many time companies and groups replace relevant hardware to reduce costs and increase returns even though this technology can still be useful. This really helps ensure as we create new technologies we are leveraging the old ones as long as possible reducing the impact to the planet around electric waste and climate change. Most scientific research groups are not interesting in going a tiny bit faster to make more money they are really just focused on the science and that can still be done on technologies companies are ready to retire. Leveraging groups like Computing for Humanity helps reduce costs on grants and increase the impact of the science we can do each day”, Sullivan noted.
This donation aligns with our goal of connecting academic institutions with servers that have been retired from the corporate sector, thereby increasing the likelihood of creating a virtuous cycle that leads to more research and discoveries.