Grants and Acknowledgements

The following standard support language can be added in grant applications by researchers looking to secure funding for computing resources in UIC Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER):

Researchers can utilize Lakeshore, a brand new, state-of-the-art high-performance computing cluster operated by UIC’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER). ACER provides access to Lakeshore through two access programs: Chicago Computes and the HPC Partnership Program.  

Chicago Computes provides fully subsidized access to 20 dual-socket compute nodes, each featuring 2 AMD EPYC 7763 processors with 64 cores per socket (128 cores per node) clocked at 2.45 GHz, coupled with 256 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. Researchers also have access to 2 GPU nodes, housing 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 80 GB of RAM per GPU, alongside a single-socket AMD EPYC 7763 processor with 64 cores at 2.45 GHz and 512 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. 

For those requiring more dedicated computing power, the HPC Partnership Program operates on a condo cluster model, offering access to resources at reduced cost. This model allows research groups to purchase nodes within a larger shared cluster, providing them the dual benefits of ownership and access to additional shared resources. The program is designed to be scalable, ensuring that as research needs grow, so too can computational capacity.  Current purchase options include dual 32-core Intel 8358 (Ice Lake) Platinum Processors with options for 256 GB, 1 TB, and 4 TB RAM. Researchers can also purchase GPU nodes equipped with either 4 A100 coprocessors  or 4 L40 coprocessors.  Storage on the Lakeshore cluster is provided by a new 3,000 TB GPFS filesystem. 

ACER also offers HPC in the Cloud, a pay-as-you-go service that leverages the cloud-based infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to provide scalable computing resources. This service is ideal for researchers with variable computational needs, allowing for the flexibility to scale resources up or down as the research demands. HPC in AWS provides access to a broad range of AWS computing resources, including the latest CPUs, GPUs, and optimized instances for specific computational tasks.

In addition to the Lakeshore and AWS cloud clusters, ACER also enables UIC researchers access to national supercomputing centers such as Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, through the NSF-funded ACCESS program. Moreover, the Lighthouse Initiative led by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), will support applications running on ALCF systems including Polaris, Graphcore, Sambanova, Groq, and Cerebras. UIC’s ACER has joined this initiative, offering assistance to UIC faculty and researchers in preparing applications, securing allocations, accessing specialized training, internship opportunities, and support from ACER staff with expertise in HPC and ALCF systems. 

Researchers whose work entails large-scale data transfers can request access to UIC’s High-Performance Research Network (HPRNet) that provides them access to dedicated data expressways which in turn connect to other Research and Education (R&E) data networks, also commonly known as Internet2. HPRNet enables data-intensive scientific collaborations across the world by facilitating bulk data transfers over GridFTP technology.

Finally, ACER provides researchers with access to a team of experienced computational and data scientists, visualization professionals, and cloud specialists. This support ensures that researchers can focus on their scientific inquiries while technical experts manage the computational aspects.

Please reference Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER) in your research publications to highlight the use of our facility and its resources. Following language can be used by researchers to cite computational resources and services provided by ACER at the University of Illinois at Chicago:

“The authors gratefu​lly acknowledge the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER) group at the University of Illinois at Chicago for providing computational resources and services needed to deliver research results delivered within this paper. URL: https://acer.uic.edu”

In addition, we kindly ask you to notify us of any reports, conference papers, journal articles, thesis, poster and talks which contain results obtained using any ACER resources or services by sending an email to acer@uic.edu and providing DOIs and the resource used. In case you do not have a DOI, please supply the following information:

• Author[s]
• Title
• Journal, Volume
• Pages or Editors
• Address or URL
• Publisher
• Year

Alternatively, you can submit a form with the required information in the link mentioned above.