Campus Research Computing Options (Copy)

The research computing environment is made up of programs offering resources for free or with an application, purpose built solutions hosted by the National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA), or enterprise cloud services that partner with the university. This article is meant to show you some of the considerations to be made and some of the supported options available to enable your work!

 

• Top Computational FAQs
• Additional Questions
• Cyber-infrastructure Programs
• Dedicated Grainger College of Engineering's Computational Resources
• Computing Resources (At-a-Glance)
• Grant and Proposal Support
• Training Resources

 

Top Computational FAQs

Are you working on Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence simulations?
If you are, you likely already know that you'll likely require a system with powerful graphics cards, what you may not know is that there are several computational resources available that you can leverage instead of purchasing your own system.

Are the simulations or tasks you running easy for a regular computer to complete but needs to be ran hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times?
This is known as a "perfectly parallel" workload and is generally a good candidate for High-Throughput Computing solutions. 

What software does your project require to run your simulations or tasks?
Many computational resources have certain software packages natively available, some have the ability to add additional software by request or onto your own profile. 

 

Additional Questions

There are other questions to consider when determining the appropriate computational resource for your project, you can find some of them below.
If you would like to meet with someone to discuss your needs please email the Research Technology Facilitator, Ethan Conner (ewconner@illinois.edu).

• Are you working with sensitive information, whether it be the input or output data, or the code that you are running?
• Will your simulations be leveraging a Message Passing Interface (MPI)?
• Do you require a computational resource that does not have a wall time (termination of job if not completed in X time)?
• How versed are your project members in Linux distributions or command line? 

 

Cyber-Infrastructure Programs

Illinois Computes

Illinois Computes is a funded program that provides several purpose built computational and storage solutions for free to researchers in the University of Illinois system. The resources available through Illinois computes can be found at the following link. What’s Available – Illinois Computes 

ACCESS

ACCESS is a program of federated systems from institutions across the nation. Researchers and Instructional staff are able to apply for a free allocation. Learn how to get started at the following link. Get Started with ACCESS 

 

Dedicated Grainger College of Engineering's Computational Resources

Illinois Campus Cluster Program

The Grainger College of Engineering (GCoE) has an investment into the Illinois Campus Cluster Program (ICCP); this resource is available to faculty, staff, and students in the GCoE at no cost for both research and instructional purposes. 

10 InfiniBand interconnected compute nodes providing 832 CPU cores and 46 A10 GPUs
   - 5 GPU nodes, 1x AMD EPYC 7763 (64-core), 320 cores total, 2560GB RAM (512GB ea.), 40x A10 GPUs (8 ea.)
   - 3 CPU nodes, 2x AMD EPYC 7713 (64-core), 384 cores total, 3TB RAM (1TB ea)*
   - 2 GPU nodes, 2x Intel Xeon 8358 (32-core), 128 cores total, 512GB RAM (256GB ea), 6x A10 GPUs (3ea.)* 

 Note: the resources marked with an asterisk (*) are assigned to our dedicated queue for instructional use

 

Computing Resources (At-a-Glance)

A full-sized version of this matrix can be found here.