Updated 2023-05-08

ICE: PACE's Instructional Cluster

What is ICE?

Note

These resources are completely free to instructors and students and available to any Georgia Tech faculty member to teach academic classes or workshops. The instructor only needs to apply in advance with course-specific information.

In 2018, PACE initiated a project called “Instructional Cluster Environment (ICE)” to build instructional clusters to support educational efforts per a high demand campus-wide. These resources offer an educational environment that matches that of our research clusters and provides thousands of graduate and undergraduate students with ample opportunities to gain first-hand scientific computing experience, including HPC and GPU programming, each year. Furthermore, the entire PACE scientific software repository is made accessible to all ICE students, providing an education environment that mirrors production research clusters.

In addition to credit-bearing courses, ICE enables PACE to develop or host hands-on tutorials and workshops to help GT researchers and students improve their computational skills. ICE is also available for other workshops hosted at GT.

Much of ICE has been made possible through extensive collaboration between PACE and the College of Computing. CoC's support has enabled the growth of ICE and the increasing diversity of CPU & GPU architectures available for student exploration and learning.

Getting Started on ICE

Open OnDemand

PACE is pleased to offer Open OnDemand on ICE, facilitating easier access to advanced computing resources for students.

OnDemand allows access to PACE via a web browser. It is especially well-suited to graphical interactive jobs, including Jupyter notebooks (for Python or other languages) and anything using a graphical desktop interface.

Visit our OOD guide for details.

How to Apply to Use ICE

Course instructors should apply to use ICE for their courses. Students who think ICE would be valuable for their course should recommend it to their instructor or TA. Students should not fill out the ICE application.

If you are teaching a course outside the College of Computing or planning a non-credit workshop, please fill out this application for ICE.

If you are teaching a course in the College of Computing, please contact David Mercer from the TSO.

All GT classes are potentially eligible for using ICE resources, but the application mechanism is necessary to ensure fair use of limited resources. Once the applications are collected, PACE identifies which classes can be supported. The decision is communicated in advance to allow preparations and to schedule orientation sessions for instructors and TAs.

Important Dates for Fall 2023

Information Sessions:

  • To be announced, in July 2023

  • While we strive to accommodate all courses, priority will be given to applications received prior to August 7, 2023. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Orientation Sessions: August 2023

  • Course instructors and TAs will be offered orientation sessions, based on availability.

Support Structure

PACE does not provide direct support for students in classes using ICE. Students should contact their course instructors and TAs for assistance with ICE. Instructors, TAs, and distributed IT professionals supporting courses on ICE may contact PACE Support.