If you do research in the Physical Sciences Division and have more computing than your laptop can handle, PSD Connect is for you. It is the campus instance of CI Connect, the platform MANIAC Lab has run since 2013 for the Open Science Grid and for collaborations such as CMS and the South Pole Telescope. There is no proposal to write and no allocation to request. Sign in at psdconnect.uchicago.edu with your CNetID, ask to join the PSD project, and you will have an account within a day.
Since 2024 PSD Connect has connected to the Pile cluster, a Kubernetes cluster the Lab operates in the Hinds data center. You get a login node with HTCondor for batch jobs, interactive notebook sessions through BinderHub, Ceph scratch storage for working data, and software delivered in containers or over CVMFS. Work that fits the high-throughput pattern, many independent jobs that each need a core or a few and modest input, can overflow to the Open Science Pool, the national pool the Lab has helped feed for two decades. Pile also returns the favor: its idle cycles go to the pool. A major software refresh in summer 2026, driven by the SBND collaboration’s needs, brought the whole stack current.
The Lab’s staff provide the user support, from the first login to debugging a workflow. Groups with larger or unusual needs, a dataset to host, a GPU pipeline, a course that wants reproducible notebooks for every student, should get in touch through the contact page; the Lab has built these arrangements for XENON, KOTO, SBND and SPT and is glad to do so for groups across the Division.
