Table of Contents
Illinois Allocation Requests
The table below contains resources available to Illinois users through the NCSA XRAS portal. For a complete list of resources, view the NCSA Resources section below.
To get started with Illinois allocations, request an NCSA Kerberos account at this link. Account creation may take up to 24 hours once requested.
Once your user account has been created, you can submit proposals for open Illinois allocation requests by visiting the NCSA XRAS proposal submission portal.
| Resource | Open Request Period | Access |
|---|---|---|
Spring & Fall Semesters | Allocation awarded by NCSA to University of Illinois Urbana campus researchers. See the Delta Allocations wiki page for more details. | |
| Open Continuously | Resources available based on service fee. See the Radiant wiki page for more details. | |
| HOLL-I | Open Continuously | Resources available based on service fee. See the HOLL-I wiki page for more details. |
| Nightingale | Open Continuously | Resources available based on service fee, for projects handling sensitive data. Coming soon to NCSA XRAS! To inquire about access, please contact Maria Jaromin (mjaromin@illinois.edu). |
| Hydro | Open Continuously | Resources available based on service fee. |
ACCESS Allocation Requests
To get started with ACCESS allocations, see the Get Started with ACCESS page on the ACCESS website.
ACCESS resources are allocated on an ongoing basis through Explore, Discover, and Accelerate allocations, and periodically through Maximize allocations.
Delta is currently the only NCSA resource available through ACCESS. For a complete list of resources available through ACCESS, see the Available Resources page on the ACCESS website.
NCSA Resources
NCSA offers access to a variety of resources that can be requested by University of Illinois users through our Illinois allocations, or, through the ACCESS program.
| Name/URL | Type | Description | Primary Use Cases | Hardware/Storage | Access | User Documentation and Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
HPC | A computing and data resource that balances cutting-edge graphics processor and CPU architectures that will shape the future of advanced research computing. Made possible by the National Science Foundation, Delta will be the most performant GPU computing resource in NSF's portfolio. | Coming soon! |
| Allocation awarded by University of Illinois or the ACCESS program - see the Delta Allocations wiki page for more details | ||
HPC | Radiant is a new private cloud computing service operated by NCSA for the benefit of NCSA and UI faculty and staff. Customers can purchase VM's, computing time in cores, storage of various types and public IP's for use with their VM's. |
| Cost varies by the Radiant resource requested - see the Radiant wiki page for more details | |||
AI-HPC | HOLL-I (Highly Optimized Logical Learning instrument) This a batch computing cluster which provides access to a Cerebras CS-2 Wafer Scale Engine for high performance Machine Learning work. It will have local home storage in addition to access to the Taiga center-wide storage system. | Extreme Scale Machine Learning with select Tensorflow and Pytorch models |
| Access and costs listed in HOLL-I User Documentation | ||
HPC | NCSA has purchased 20 nodes that affiliates may request access to: https://campuscluster.illinois.edu/new_forms/user_form.php Alternatively, individuals, groups, and campus units can invest in compute and storage resources on the cluster or purchase compute time on demand or storage space by the terabyte/month. |
| ||||
HTC | The High Throughput Computing (HTC) Pilot program is a collaborative, volunteer effort between Research IT, Engineering IT Shared Services, and NCSA. The computing systems that comprise the HTC Pilot resource are retired compute nodes from the Illinois Campus Cluster Program (ICCP) or otherwise idle workstations in Linux Workstation labs. | The HTC service is not intended to run MPI jobs |
| Allocation awarded by University of Illinois Urbana campus | ||
HIPAA HPC | Nightingale is a high-performance compute cluster for sensitive data. It offers researchers a secure system for data storage and powerful computation. The system is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security rules for using Protected Health Information (PHI). Nightingale is not limited to the health domain and accommodates projects that require this amount of security or less, such as compliance with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) policies. It resides in the NCSA National Petascale Facility and is audited yearly by an outside entity to ensure secure operation (SOC 2, Type 2). | Projects working with HIPAA, CUI, and other protected or sensitive data. |
| Cost to purchase nodes and storage | ||
| Research IT Software Collaborative Services | Support | Getting Hands-On Programming Support for performance analysis, software optimization, efficient use of accelerators, I/O optimization, data analytics, visualization, use of research computing resources by science gateways, and workflows | Coming soon! | N/A | Allocation awarded by campus Research IT | |
Archive Storage | Granite is NCSA's Tape Archive system, closely integrated with Taiga, to provide users with a place to store longer term archive datasets. Access to this tape system is available directly via tools such as scp, Globus, and S3. Data written to Granite is replicated to two tapes for mirrored protection in case of tape failure. |
|
| Contact Support | ||
Storage | Taiga is NCSA's Global File System that is able to integrate with all non-HIPAA environments in the National Petascale Computation Facility. Built with SSUs (Scaleable Storage Units) spec'd by NCSA engineers with DDN, it provides a center-wide, single-namespace file system that is available to use across multiple platforms at NCSA. This allows researchers to access their data on multiple systems simultaneously; improving their ability to run science pipelines across batch, cloud, and container resources. Taiga is also well integrated with the Granite Tape Archive to allow users to readily stage out data to their tape allocation for long term, cold storage. |
|
| Contact Support | ||
| HAL | ||||||
| Innovative Systems Lab (ISL) | ||||||
| HYDRO | HPC | The Hydro HPC cluster system is an HPC platform made available by NFI, offering CPU and GPU options for AI/ML/MPI workloads. The GPUs available are cutting-edge Nvidia A100 80GB variants. | Priority use for NFI projects. Additional time is available. |
| Contact Support |
Please contact help@ncsa.illinois.edu if you have any questions or need help getting started with NCSA resources.