Lakeshore

Launched in January 2024, as part of the Forward Initiative, the Lakeshore HPC Cluster currently serves as UIC’s flagship supercomputing resource for campus, supporting the Chicago Computes program and HPC partnership nodes purchased by many different departments and colleges. The original configuration is 141 compute nodes and 3 petabytes of aggregate storage. The cluster  will continue to be augmented with an additional nodes as UIC's need for computational research increases.

The Chicago Computes nodes which provide free access for UIC faculty were purchased through the Forward Initiative and additional nodes are funded by departments and colleges. Those who are interested in purchasing resources on Lakeshore through the HPC Partnership program should visit the Resource Pricing page for more information.

  • 10,304 Cores for High Performance Computing

  • 57 TB High Performace Memory

  • 3 PB Total Local Raw Storage (in PetaBytes)

Cluster Configuration Heading link

Lakeshore is a powerful machine with 10,304 cores, 57.2 Terabytes of memory and 3 Petabytes storage. In it’s first year, Lakeshore supports more than 357 researchers across over 100 different research groups from 10 colleges and institutes. As the result of unprecedented collaboration across several stakeholders, Lakeshore is built partly on a partnership model where multiple departments and colleges invested to allow their affiliated faculty to use this resource and is partly funded by the Forward Initiative, providing limited free resources to all UIC faculty.

The following provides a brief overview of the configuration of Lakeshore:

Chicago Computes

Chicago Computes Program supports all faculty at UIC with free compute and storage resources. Chicago Computes partitions consist of AMD nodes.
Node Type Nodes Cores/Nodes Clock Speed (GHz) Memory (GB)
Standard Compute 20 128 2.45 256
4 x A100 GPU 2 64 2.45 256

HPC Partnership

HPC Partnership program (aka Condo) is a buy-in option for researchers and departments. Each node that is purchased is available 24/7 for priority use by the purchasing PI or department. HPC partnership partitions consist of Intel hardware.
Type Nodes Cores/Node Clock Speed (GHz) Memory (GB)
Standard Compute 87 64 2.6 256
4 x L40 GPU 7 64 2.1 256
Mid-Mem 25 64 2.6 1000

Lakeshore Research Data Rapids Storage consists of 3 Petabytes of GPFS file storage.

Each account on the Lakeshore HPC Cluster receives 1 TB of storage on Research Data Rapids high performance storage. More storage space may be purchased.

Interconnect: Lakeshore uses Infiniband (QDR) high speed network. Communicating with each other through high bandwidth Infiniband switches.