Additional Computational Resources
Some researchers may have needs that exceed our campus computing capabilities — whether they need more machines to complete a task quickly or more specialized compute nodes (e.g., GPUs). The following external platforms are available to UC Merced researchers.
ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support)
ACCESS is the national-level computing resource program that replaced XSEDE. It provides access to high-performance computing systems at centers including the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC). ACCESS offers significant allocations of compute time to researchers interested in running HPC workloads at large scale.
Here is an overview of current ACCESS resource providers and available computational resources:
F3i Supercomputing Center
F3i is a California nonprofit building computing infrastructure for California's agricultural industry. Their Supercomputing Center provides interactive notebooks, batch jobs, and a shared team filesystem — all running on real GPUs at the Fresno State data center.
F3i runs on Kubernetes within the National Research Platform (NRP). You do not need to know Kubernetes or YAML for day-to-day use; the platform is designed so you can get productive without learning cluster internals.
The Mental Model
Your work lives inside a Kubernetes namespace scoped to your team:
- Team workspace — everyone you invite shares the same namespace.
- Team GPU-hour balance — a shared pool that anyone in the workspace can draw from; every debit is attributed to the individual who spent it.
- Team volume — a shared persistent filesystem mounted at
/workspace, visible to every notebook and every batch job in your workspace.
Two Ways to Work
| Surface | What you do here |
|---|---|
| Browser (JupyterHub) | Interactive notebooks, dashboard, billing |
| F3i API | Batch jobs, programmatic access, CI/CD pipelines |
To get started, visit the F3i portal.