High-performance computers have become essential to research in many disciplines across the Illinois campus, from astronomy to biology to chemistry on through the alphabet to zoology. The Illinois Campus Cluster is a campuswide resource that meets this need for research computing cycles.

Individuals, groups, and campus units can invest in compute and storage resources on the cluster, which is housed at the Advanced Computation Building, a facility specially designed to support high-performance computing systems. Those who invest in compute resources on the cluster have guaranteed access to the number and type of nodes in which they invested. When any owner is not using his or her share, any other user may take advantage of the surplus. In this way, researchers get more computing capacity for their money than they would by building many separate systems across campus. Pooling computer resources also helps researchers control expenses and reduce overhead, shorten startup time, avoid space renovation and free up space formerly used for separate cluster resources, and reduce the campus carbon footprint.

Campus researchers are also able to purchase compute time on demand or storage space by the terabyte/month. These options are ideal for those whose projects are more sporadic or have a shorter duration.

Any researcher at Illinois can contribute and any contributor can benefit.

For more information, contact help@campuscluster.illinois.edu. To purchase nodes or time on demand, go to the online order page. To purchase storage disks or rent space by the TB/month, go to the storage order page.

Startup funding for this project has been provided by the Office of the Chancellor.

You are also eligible to purchase nodes in the UIC Cluster Program.