Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Lighthouse Initiative

About

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) Lighthouse Initiative aims to broaden the reach of HPC and actively engage with the upcoming generation of computing professionals. The University of Chicago Research Computing center has joined the ALCF lighthouse initiative, which will provide an avenue and support for University faculty and researchers interested in using ALCF resources. Through this initiative, we will assist faculty and researchers by/with:

    • Preparing, porting and testing applications for suitability of ALCF resources and for scaling the applications for use on ALCF systems
    • Providing an allocation on an ALCF systems along with tier 1 support for qualified projects
    • Aiding in migrating projects from Lighthouse to a ALCF larger allocation, such as INCITE/ALCC/DD for graduating projects
    • Access to specialized training tailored for the University offered by Argonne
    • Access to information about summer internship opportunities for students
    • Access to RCC staff with HPC and ALCF systems expertise

Spring 2024 Call for Projects

Eligibility: Active RCC PI account
Duration: 6 months (renewable)
Call for proposals: Twice annually. Cycle 1 accepted throughout October. Cycle 2 accepted throughout April. (currently piloting projects with anticipated first proposal acceptance period in October 2024)
Quarterly reports: Yes

Proposal Information

Submit a, no more than, 2-page proposal highlighting the research this initiative would support, why this resource is needed, the potential impact or discovery, and any software that will be needed.

If your project is selected, you will be contacted for more details about the application you are running or access to your application/code for pre-testing.


Events

    • 2025 ALCF Hands-on HPC Workshop: Join us for the 2025 ALCF Hands-on HPC Workshop, a two-part event designed to advance ALCF users’ skills in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The virtual week (September 23-25) covers the fundamentals of building, compiling, and running applications on ALCF systems, and will include overviews for getting started on Aurora and Polaris. This virtual segment is strongly recommended for new users. The in-person week at Argonne (October 7-9) offers in-depth sessions and dedicated hands-on time with ALCF staff and industry experts.
    • ParaView – Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Training (Oct 2): ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform scientific data analysis and visualization tool that enables the analysis and visualization of extremely large datasets. ParaView is both a general-purpose, end-user application with a distributed architecture that can be seamlessly leveraged by your desktop or other remote parallel computing resources and an extensible framework with a collection of tools and libraries for various applications, including scripting (using Python), web visualization (through trame), or in-situ analysis (with Catalyst).

Resources

The Lighthouse Initiative currently supports applications running on the following ALCF systems:

    • Polaris
    • Graphcore
    • Sambanova
    • Groq
    • Cerebras

News and Events

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Contact

For questions or assistance, please contact help@rcc.uchicago.edu, call 773 795 2667 or visit Regenstein Library, suite 216.