External Computing Resources
NSF ACCESS Program
ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support) is an advanced computing and data resource supported by the National Science Foundation. These are essentially free national supercomputing resources that are managed accross universities and labs across the country. ACCESS provides 4 tiers of resources: Explore (400,000 credits), Discover (1,500,000 credits), Accelerate (3,000,000 credits), Maximize (unlimited).
The wonderful thing about ACCESS is that the the Explore tier is available to graduate students under the guidance of an advisor. The Explore application only requires an abstract to complete submission. Discover is more applicable to multi-person research labs and requires 1 page templated description. Accelerate is for more hefty research objectives which require a thorough 3-5 page description and a review by a board.
- Getting started with an allocation request
- Allocation types and comparison table
- Allocation request requirements
ACCESS via Jetstream2 tutorial
Follow this tutorial to learn how to use the Jetstream2 supercomputing facilities with your ACCESS credits. Learn to navigate Jetstream2’s interface, set up VS Code, and use development containers inside Jetstream2!
National Research Platform
The National Research Platform is a nationally distributed computing system that is available for usage by both students and faculty. NRP provides a tool called Nautilus which gives researchers access to GPU enabled environments that can be run via Jupyter Notebooks from the browser. For more details, follow the documentation for Nautilus in order to gain access and learn about its usage!
Private Options
There are many available computing options such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. They all offer some sort of “free tier” that has limited availability and computational capacity. Paid tiers offer flexible configurations (CPU, GPU, TPU) with various integrations (Jupyter, RStudio, TensorFlow, etc).