ALCF Director's Discretionary

alcf.anl.gov · Compute · 1 record · JSON

ALCF Director's Discretionary Compute

fails: identityinstitutionno cardDwrite-gated

www.alcf.anl.gov/science/directors-discretionary-allocation- · national HPC allocation · compute/alcf-director-s-discretionary · JSON · compare

Free tier	A rolling award available year-round, usually three to six months, renewable, open to researchers from universities, industry and government agencies with no DOE sponsorship required, and also the documented route to the ALCF AI Testbed accelerators (Groq, Graphcore, SambaNova, Cerebras) via the same allocation request form. unit none; metered on wall-clock; exploratory / startup allocation
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not applicable
Retention	not applicable
Egress	not stated
Identity	institution not published
Limits	write-gated The DD award itself waives the institutional user agreement that INCITE, ALCC and OLCF DD all require, but the account application still asks for an employer and every non-US citizen must obtain DOE foreign-national authorisation through an ANL-593 request with passport and CV, so a person with no employer and no affiliation has nothing to put in the required field and no sponsor for the request. source The DD award itself waives the institutional user agreement that INCITE, ALCC and OLCF DD all require, but the account application still asks for an employer and every non-US citizen must obtain DOE foreign-national authorisation through an ANL-593 request with passport and CV, so a person with no employer and no affiliation has nothing to put in the required field and no sponsor for the request.
Binding	write-gated The DD award itself waives the institutional user agreement that INCITE, ALCC and OLCF DD all require, but the account application still asks for an employer and every non-US citizen must obtain DOE foreign-national authorisation through an ANL-593 request with passport and CV, so a person with no employer and no affiliation has nothing to put in the required field and no sponsor for the request.
Interface	unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	The AI Testbed variants are the unusual part: one rolling form reaches Groq, Graphcore, Cerebras and SambaNova, accelerator classes no cloud free tier offers. With one named institutional collaborator this becomes the cheapest entry to exascale-class silicon in the corpus.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	This is the single most valuable structural finding in the DOE stack: ALCF DD is the only tier found anywhere in this assignment where the institutional user agreement is explicitly waived, which removes the signature that blocks INCITE and OLCF DD. What remains is an employer field and a DOE foreign-national authorisation (ANL-593) under DOE Order 142.3, which is a process rather than a contract. If for a user can name any collaborating organisation, ALCF DD is the lowest-friction route to an exascale-class GPU allocation that this assignment found. ALCF publishes no node-hour range ('Award size: Small', 'The size of the award varies'), so the 20,000 node-hour figure belongs to OLCF and must not be carried across. The AI Testbed accelerators (Groq, Graphcore, Cerebras, SambaNova) are reached through the same rolling form and are the only route found to non-NVIDIA accelerator classes.
Evidence rung	documented
Checked	2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-21
Parsed numbers	`$.limits[0].value` limit:write-gated 593.0 request

Evidence (5)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	www.alcf.anl.gov/science/directors-discretionary-allocation-	'Open to researchers from industry, academia, and government agencies, DD awards are available year-round on a rolling basis and are usually between three and six months in duration. The size of the award varies based on the application and its readiness/ability to scale', quoted
2026-10-22	www.alcf.anl.gov/science/directors-discretionary-allocation-	'DOE sponsorship is not required'; award size 'Small'; quarterly reports no; end-of-allocation reports no, quoted
2026-10-22	www.alcf.anl.gov/alcf-ai-testbed	'Researchers can now submit project proposals for the Groq, Graphcore, and Cerebras CS-3 platforms via the ALCF's Director's Discretionary program. There is no submission deadline', quoted
2026-10-22	docs.alcf.anl.gov/account-project-management/project-managem	'User Agreement for INCITE, ALCC, and ADSP ... Note: This does not apply to Director's Discretionary awards', quoted; the Institution Master Agreement section carries the same exemption
2026-10-22	www.alcf.anl.gov/support-center/get-started/request-account	account request requires 'the name of your employer'; 'Foreign nationals must provide their passport number, their USCIS documents, and a PDF of their CV', quoted

More fields (1)

{
 "wave2": {
  "class": "national-hpc",
  "free_tier_kind": "exploratory / startup allocation",
  "shape": {
   "vcpu": null,
   "ram_gib": null,
   "gpu_class": "Intel Data Center GPU Max (Aurora), NVIDIA A100 (Polaris), Groq/Graphcore/SambaNova/Cerebras (AI Testbed)",
   "gpu_count": null
  }
 }
}

Unknown or withheld values (10)

$.egress.metered egress-unknown
$.egress.terms not-stated
$.identity_cost.detail process
$.interface interface-unknown
$.per_object_cap.notes process
$.per_object_cap.stated not-applicable
$.reliability_note none-observed
$.retention.notes process
$.retention.stated not-applicable
$.tooling not-stated