Radiant User Documentation

Introduction

Radiant is a private cloud computing service operated by NCSA for the benefit of NCSA and University of Illinois faculty and staff. Radiant provides researchers a flexible, elastic, and scalable computing solution, using cloud-like virtualization while remaining on-site at NCSA.

You can purchase virtual machines (VMs), computing time in cores, storage of various types, and public IPs for use with your VMs. VMs can be as small as 1 vCPU with 4GiB RAM up to a maximum of 32 vCPUs and 64GiB RAM. Projects may be a single large VM, many small VMs, or any combination that meets your requirements. Each project is encapsulated so that other Radiant users can’t see, access, or disrupt machines running as part of your project. You can create new VMs based on available operating system images using an interactive web interface or OpenStack API.

VMs may have publicly accessible network interfaces so that external users can access the resources provided by your systems. Radiant hosts provide 25Gb network links to the 100Gb cluster network and links to the NCSA WAN infrastructure at 100Gb.

Radiant offers two pools of storage to meet different data storage needs: a high-performance, low-latency CEPH storage system built on enterprise SSDs, and high-volume bulk storage available through NCSA’s Taiga.