A national platform, run by the people who use it
The National Research Platform is shared research computing: GPUs, storage, and hosted AI models, pooled across more than 70 institutions and offered free to U.S. nonprofit research and education. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and governed by the community that contributes to it.
- 400+
- Nodes
- 70+
- Locations
- 3
- Continents
- 5K+
- Users
NRP and Nautilus
NRP is the platform
The project, the community, and the shared pool of hardware. Institutions contribute nodes and keep priority on their own hardware; when they are not using it, everyone else gets opportunistic access. This is the name used in anything public-facing.
Nautilus is the cluster
The Kubernetes cluster the NRP runs on. It is the name in the technical documentation, in hostnames like nrp-nautilus.io, and in the cluster tooling itself. If you are reading about pods and namespaces, you are reading about Nautilus.
Who runs the NRP
The award's principal investigator and co-principal investigators.
Principal Investigator
Frank Würthwein
Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center · Executive Director, Open Science Grid · UC San Diego
Co-PI
Tajana Rosing
Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering · UC San Diego
Co-PI
Tom DeFanti
Research Scientist, Calit2 / Qualcomm Institute · UC San Diego
Co-PI
Mahidhar Tatineni
User Support Group Lead, San Diego Supercomputer Center · UC San Diego
Co-PI
Derek Weitzel
Research Assistant Professor, School of Computing · University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Who builds and operates it
Engineering, operations, user support, and project management across the participating institutions.
James Letts
Project Manager - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
Ilkay Altintas
Chief Data Science Officer - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
Larry Smarr
PI of PRP - Distinguished Professor Emeritus - CSE, UCSD
Qi (Rose) Yu
Assistant Professor - CSE, UCSD
Tom Hutton
Chief Network Architect - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
John Graham
Senior Development Engineer - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
Dmitry Mishin
Full Stack DevOps - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL)
Daniel Diaz
User Support - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
Mohammad Sada
Full Stack Engineer, AI Infrastructure - San Diego Supercomputer Center - UCSD
Seungmin Kim
Full Stack, AI Inference, DevOps - Yonsei University College of Medicine
Huijun Zhu
System Administrator - Holland Computing Center UNL
Ashton Graves
Devops Engineer - University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Sam Albin
Devops Engineer - University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Supported by the NSF
The National Research Platform is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under the following awards. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this site are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
- CNS-1730158
- ACI-1540112
- ACI-1541349
- OAC-1826967
- OAC-2112167
- CNS-2100237
- CNS-2120019
Institutions and how to join
Use the platform
Free to researchers and educators at U.S. nonprofit institutions, community colleges included, not just R1 universities.
Contribute hardware
We install the OS, configure the node, and handle upgrades; we just need IPMI access. Contributors get priority on their own hardware whenever they want it.
Who is already here
Universities, national labs, and research organizations across three continents contribute nodes, network, and storage to the pool.
Questions about the NRP?
Come to bi-weekly office hours, join the support chat, or email the team directly.