ALCF launches first large-scale AI inference service for open science
May 26, 2026 | ALCF news
By Jim Collins
A key enabler for DOE’s Genesis Mission, the ALCF Inference Service helps researchers accelerate the path from data to insight to discovery.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has launched a first-of-its-kind AI inference service to help researchers across the nation accelerate discovery and innovation.
The service offers cloud-like access to a range of large language models (LLMs) and science foundation models running on Argonne’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems. This gives researchers a powerful and secure resource for analyzing large datasets and testing new ideas.
“Our inference service helps close the gap between developing AI models and putting them to work in scientific research,” said Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). “By offering AI inference as a shared resource, we enable researchers to apply AI at scale to their data, simulations, and experiments, without the burden of building and maintaining their own infrastructure.”
Inference is the process of using trained AI models to analyze data, identify patterns and make predictions. AI chatbots like ChatGPT use inference to answer questions in real time. In research, the same capability can help scientists guide experiments, make sense of complex data and perform other analytical tasks more efficiently.
The service relies on Globus Compute and Globus Auth to enable secure, federated access to AI inference capabilities on ALCF systems. This allows researchers from different institutions to use their existing organizational credentials while supporting inference workflows across distributed computing resources.
“Inference services allow researchers to spend less time managing models and more time testing hypotheses,” said Venkat Vishwanath, AI and machine learning lead at the ALCF. “Instead of taking days or weeks to analyze data, scientists can rapidly interpret results, refine experiments and explore complex systems in ways that weren’t practical before.”
Expanding from computing to service-enabled science
The service itself is part of the ALCF’s broader Service-Enabled Science program, which brings together HPC and AI resources, integrated workflow tools, AI model training capabilities, and large-scale data sharing and analysis. This approach provides scientists with a complete suite of tools and services, supporting every stage of their research projects.
“ALCF’s shift from providing raw computing power to delivering integrated services gives researchers a connected environment that supports data generation, simulation, and AI inference, accelerating scientific discovery,” Papka said.
For details on using the ALCF Inference Service, see the ALCF user guide or watch the webinar, “Deploying Inference Services at ALCF.”