What's Available
What's available via Direct Request?
Illinois Computes resources and support are currently available to all faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Graduate students may request resources only.
Illinois Computes also has a mission to provide compute and storage resources to researchers across all three University of Illinois campuses, as well as researchers in priority strategic initiatives of the University System, such as the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI). Details on this are still being worked out. Faculty and researchers from elsewhere in the UI System are still encouraged to contact us with needs.
Continue to visit this website for updates about what’s available to you.
For Users from the Urbana Campus
- Faculty: Compute, Storage, and Support
- Research Staff: Compute, Storage, and Support
- Graduate Students: Compute and Storage only
- Other Support access may be obtained through a faculty member
- Undergraduate Students: None
- Compute, Storage, and Support may be obtained through a faculty member
For Users from Other Campuses and Strategic Initiatives
- Faculty: None
- Research Staff: None
- Graduate Students: None
- Undergraduate Students: None
For a full list of available resources and allocations, see the chart below.
A Note About Instructional Use
Note that Illinois Computes’ resources are primarily intended to support research. Only the Campus Cluster currently has any official support for instructional use. Illinois Computes’ leadership is aware of desire for more support for instruction and is exploring ways to accommodate this.
Allocation Amounts
Each available resource and support type has its own base allocation amount. Which resource and support is available varies depending on the campus and/or system initiative of the researcher.
Illinois Computes was created to guarantee a base-level of resources to researchers. It is important for researchers to note that:
- Awarded allocations are good for one year (and may be renewable).
- Additional amounts may be available depending on current utilization levels.
- Amounts available for new allocations are subject to change at any time.
Researchers needing resources and support beyond what Illinois Computes provides at no cost (listed below) will need to either obtain funding to pay for additional usage or use alternate resources and support. Illinois Computes does provide no-cost assistance to aid in identifying additional resources and support and in estimating the total cost required to obtain and use them.
Available Resources
Resource
Description
Baseline No-Cost Availability
CPU & GPU batch-submission environment plus storage
100,000 CPU hours
1,000 GPU hours
5TB of storage per year
Hosted web-based Jupyter notebooks for interactive computing
Access now at https://jupyter.ncsa.illinois.edu/
100GB of storage
Private cloud computing service
1 virtual machine (VM) with:
- 8 vCPUs
- 32GB RAM
- 100GB SSD
- 40GB non-SSD
1 public IP address
Computation and storage environment for regulated data (CUI, HIPAA, ePHI)
Up to $1,250 in total costs covered – researcher choice from these offerings:
- shared interactive node – $267.50/month/user
- dedicated interactive node – $1,337.50/month/user
- batch computing – $0.027/core-hour
- database services – $968.50/user/year
- storage – $126.45/TB/year
Alternate CPU & GPU option for some use cases
Up to 8,900 SUs (service units)
- 1 node hour on 16c Sandy Bridge host = 1 SU
- 1 node hour on 64c Interlagos host = 1 SU
- 1 node hour on 64c Rome or 56c Milan host = 6 SU
- 1 node hour with 2 NVIDIA A100 GPU = 20 SU
1TB of storage
Available Support
Illinois Computes provides support expertise to assist researchers from basic how-to questions to specialized and complex questions. Illinois Computes funded staff will work with you to understand your needs and identify the person with the right experience and expertise to best help you.
See the Support page for more details on each of these offerings.
Staff availability may be limited for more in-depth, time-intensive engagements, but Illinois Computes will work to provide as much support as possible to assist researchers. Guidelines and criteria regarding what Illinois Computes is able to support are being developed.
The System investment does not currently provide any support beyond basic assistance with using any provided resources. The governance committee for the System investment is considering changing this to provide some amount of additional support to researchers.