Tools and Services

Welcome to HPC

This collaboration facilitates multidisciplinary discoveries and support for the university community to help advance research productivity and conduct world-renowned research. Progress in our campus' mission and vision in the area of research depends on a stronger data infrastructure including the analysis and interpretation of large and complex data resources. The Alpine HPC is a supercomputing cluster housed in Boulder and is centrally funded by the Chancellor for CU Anschutz faculty, researchers, staff, and students. Watch the two-minute highlight of the ribbon cutting ceremony. 

The CU Boulder Research Computing (CURC) team has an established computational infrastructure and is already supporting the Alpine research compute environment. This comprehensive supercomputing environment is for large dataset processing and analysis and is equipped with:

• More than 18,000 cores (free of charge, except for the PetaLibrary)
• 382 compute nodes
• Access to AMD GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and high memory nodes

For researchers that need additional compute resources, a buy-in opportunity for more dedicated resources will be made available. In addition, research data storage services are available from the CURC PetaLibrary. Information about PetaLibrary costs and additional options for backing up data can be found at The PetaLibrary webpage on the CU Boulder Research Computing website.  

* Please note: Alpine is not a HIPAA compliant system and no highly confidential data should be analyzed or stored on Alpine. For additional information about classifying sensitive university data, visit the CU Office of Information Security's Data Classification webpage. 

System Access

Complete the following steps to start the process for access to the new HPC system:

1. Request access to Alpine by completing the End User Agreement (EUA).
2. Once the process to onboard users to Alpine begins, an email will be sent to you confirming that access to the HPC system has been approved.
3. Training will be conducted by the research compute group in Boulder via Zoom. Onboarding classes are offered monthly and sign up information for the training sessions will be available in the confirmation email.