Case Study: The Ohio State University achieves localized COVID-19 analytics for safer schools with Dell Technologies

Innovating with data for the safety of children

The Ohio State University needed timely, local COVID-19 data to help school administrators, teachers and parents decide whether to open schools in 2020–21. Working through the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the university used infrastructure built by Dell Technologies—including Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, CoolIT direct liquid cooling and EDR InfiniBand networking—to develop the CATS (COVID-19 Analytics and Targeted Surveillance) system for localized monitoring and decision support.

Dell Technologies’ systems at OSC powered the CATS analytics, enabling 16 dashboards, automated alerts and weekly reports that supported daily decision-making across 21 Central Ohio school districts (serving roughly 1.4 million residents and 238,000 school‑aged children). The solution improved prediction of localized outbreaks, provided critical local insights for safer in‑person or hybrid learning, and ran on Dell Technologies‑built clusters delivering more than 50,000 Intel Xeon compute cores.

The Ohio State University

Ayaz Hyder

Assistant Professor, College of Public Health