Introducing the Chicago Computes Program: providing critical digital infrastructure to enable research and scholarship
The 21st century is often referred to as the age of the knowledge economy. If (physical) infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is required for the knowledge economy. With this in mind, ACER is happy to announce the start of the Chicago Computes (CC) program, which seeks to lower the digital divide across underrepresented scientific disciplines by democratizing access to expertise, data and computation resources.
What is the Chicago Computes Program? Heading link
Through this program, eligible UIC faculty and their lab members will be granted fully-subsidized access to advanced computing, visualization, and data resources, along with broad access to research computing facilitators and data scientists, to help them accomplish their research and scholarship goals.
Chicago Computes allocations are valid for one year from the date of activation and can be renewed upon request.
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The Chicago Computes Program raises the floor and increases digital equity and inclusion across our research community by broadening access to these key resources. Historic investments made by UIC leadership through the Forward Initiative is enabling this program and shows campus commitment to furthering research and scholarship missions.
| Associate CIO for Research Technologies and Innovation
Who is eligible to participate in the program? Heading link
The Chicago Computes program is open to all UIC faculty (including assistant, associate, adjunct, and full professors), who can then share their allocation allowance with their postdocs, grad students, staff researchers, and other campus research affiliates.
What resources are available? Heading link
We are still finalizing the exact resources available through this program but generally speaking, eligible researchers will be able to request one or more of the following resources each year:
Computing Time
- Up to 5000 core-hours or 50 GPU hours
Research Data Storage
- 2 TB of storage on Research Data Lake
- 500 GB on Research Data Glacier for meeting NIH Data Sharing requirements
- 1 TB of high-performance storage on Research Data Rapids for HPC users
- Unlimited access to Globus – a Research Data Management tool
Consultation Resources
- Computational scientists
- Bioinformatics
- AI programmers & engineers
- Cloud Architects
- Systems & Data Engineers
Where can I find more information? Heading link
We are aiming to open this program and start accepting requests for allocations in October 2023. More information about this program will be made available on acer.uic.edu and it.uic.edu in the near future.