AICR

AICR is a multi-institution AI-focused computing cluster at MGHPCC that will be available to Yale researchers later this year. The system is designed to accelerate AI innovation by providing the compute and data capacity essential for cutting-edge development. This effort is a partnership between the Massachusetts Commonwealth and MGHPCC’s six member universities—Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, and Yale University.

The cluster initially contains 248 B200 GPUs and 152 RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs for AI and AI-enabled research.

AICR User Documentation

Below you will find Yale-specific AICR information. For all other AICR documentation, please visit the official AICR Documentation.

AICR User Documentation

Access the Cluster

AICR is currently in alpha and will be available in for Early Access in Spring 2026. AICR availability and information on how to request access will be announced to the YCRC user mailing list and the YCRC Bulldog newsletter.

Later in 2026 access to AICR will be granted via an internal Yale proposal process (details to be announced). All Early Access users will be expected to submit to and be approved through that process to continue to have AICR access.

Certificate-signed SSH Keys

AICR uses certificate-signed SSH keys that are generated for you and put into your account. To get these keys you:

Log into http://ood.aicr.ai with your Yale netid and password (not your AICR username)
Open the File Browser and download the aicr_keys.zip file

To install these keys follow these steps:

# copy keys to local $HOME/.ssh directory
cp aicr_keys/id_ed25519_aicr* $HOME/.ssh/

# fix permissions on private key
cd $HOME/.ssh/
chmod 600 id_ed25519_aicr

# To change passphrase (initial passphrase is in aicr_keys/.passphrase):
ssh-keygen -p -f $HOME/.ssh/id_ed25519_aicr

# Then (needs passphrase):
ssh-add id_ed25519_aicr

#To log in:
ssh aicr_username@login.aicr.ai

Your AICR username is your netid followed by _yale, for example: abc123_yale.⠀

Get Help

Support for Yale researchers on AICR is provided by the YCRC. Users can contact us for assistance with AICR at research.computing@yale.edu and other ways of engaging with YCRC Research Support.

Installed Applications

A large number of software and applications are installed on our clusters, including AICR. AICR software will be made available to researchers via software modules.

During Alpha, you will need to load the Yale-specific StdEnv module to get access to our software modules:

module load yale/StdEnv

In the coming weeks, the Yale StdEnv module will be automatically loaded on login for all Yale users.

If you need a specific application that is not present, let us know and we can install it for you.

Partitions and Hardware

AICR initially contains 248 B200 GPUs and 152 RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs, grouped into Slurm partitions meant to serve different purposes. Currently, there are five partitions:

cpu: a small CPU-only partition for jobs which do not require GPU cars
rtx-devel and b200-devel: interactive access to GPUs, comprised of ~10% of the available cards
rtx-batch and b200-batch: large, batch-job-only partitions

All nodes feature the same AMD 9575F CPUs with 128 cores (across two sockets). The CPU nodes offer 1TB of RAM, while the GPU nodes all have 2.2TB.

Note, the default job parameters are slightly different than YCRC clusters. The most notable differences are the default time-limit of 15 minutes and the default memory allocation of 1GB.

More information on AICR partitions and associated limits can be found in the AICR Documentation.

Storage

AICR has access to an all-flash, NFS filesystem similar to the Roberts filesystem on Bouchet and the Palmer filesystem on Grace and McCleary.

Note: Scratch is a per user directory and quota, not a shared directory like other YCRC clusters.

No storage on AICR is backed up. Self-service snapshots are available for home and work on the main AICR filesystem but do not provide protection against many types of storage failures. We encourage you to back up all critical data to a secondary storage location.

Partition	Root Directory	Storage	File Count	Backups	Snapshots	Notes
home	`/home/<username>`	100GiB/user	500,000	No	7 days
work	`/work/yale/<project>`	1TiB/project*	5,000,000	No	7 days
scratch	`/scratch/<username>`	10TiB/user	15,000,000	No	No	30-day purge

* Additional storage quota may be available upon request with appropriate justification.

Last update: June 3, 2026