vForge is a high-throughput batch computing cluster built on NCSA’s Radiant cloud computing environment and Taiga center-wide storage system. Designed as a starting point for NCSA’s industry partners, vForge provides an advanced computing environment with a rich set of pre-installed applications covering modeling and simulation, genomics, and data analytics. To improve user productivity, vForge provides web-based portal access that simplifies running interactive applications such as Jupyter Notebooks.
Currently configured with 8-compute nodes, each with 24-cores/48-threads and 192GB of RAM, and 1 GPU node consisting of 1 A100-SXM4-80GB GPU, 12-core/24-threads, and 250GB of RAM. vForge can be dynamically scaled to meet changing workloads.
Because vForge uses the Taiga center-wide storage, it is naturally integrated with other NCSA computational resources available to partners including HOLL-I, an extreme scale machine-learning system, and Radiant, cloud computing for persistent services. Partners are able to leverage the resources they need to meet their most complex computational challenges without the need to transfer data across systems.
vForge is designed to be a starting point for partners. vForge can be easily replicated to provide a customized and dedicated computational resource for partners looking for more control of a computing environment. Finally, NCSA can deploy and manage a physical cluster in NPCF, our state-of-art machine room.
vForge is charged based on the use of the compute nodes through the Slurm batch scheduler. Nodes are dedicated during job execution and charged by the node-hour. Billing will occur monthly for the prior month’s usage.
Industrial Partners are provided 50TB of Taiga storage for project space. Project space is usable across all NCSA systems. Additional project storage can be purchased on an as-needed basis for $48.36 / TB / year.
vForge also provides 10GB of local home space per user at no additional charge.
NCSA’s Industrial Program provides basic consulting for system usage and access for all partners. NCSA can also provide software development, analytics, and computation expertise for a fee that covers staff time and materials. Contact the Industrial Program to discuss additional project needs.
help+industry@ncsa.illinois.edu 217-244-0710
For more information about partnering with NCSA please contact industry@ncsa.illinois.edu