Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Inference Endpoints
No-cost research and development inference across 7 models; not unrestricted production use.
https://inference-api.alcf.anl.govModels mentioned
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instructmeta-llama/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instructmistralai/Mistral-Large-Instruct-2407openai/gpt-oss-120bargonne/AuroraGPT-IT-v4-0125google/gemma-4-31B-itnvidia/nemotron-3-ultraEquivalent paid value
How this was valued: The published allowance or a defensible paid comparison is not precise enough to calculate.
User allocation is project-specific and the facility has no like-for-like commercial unit price.
Limits and terms
- Numeric User Limit
- allocation specific
- Batch Max Requests
- 150,000
- Cold Start Minutes
- 10-15
What happens to your prompts?
Institutional controls apply, but endpoint-wide content retention, training, administrator access, and deletion terms are not public.
- Plan Scope
- Argonne Leadership Computing Facility research allocations and inference endpoints; project and Department of Energy policies apply.
- Prompt Retention
- No endpoint-wide public prompt-retention TTL was found.
- Response Retention
- not documented
- Ordinary Logging
- Facility authentication, allocation, security, and operational telemetry may be logged; content logging is not documented in the endpoint guide.
- Model Training
- No public commitment excludes research workload content from secondary analysis or model training across all projects.
- Product Improvement
- Facility telemetry may support operations and research; content scope is not specified.
- Human Or Operator Access
- Facility administrators and project personnel may have privileged technical access under institutional controls.
- Subprocessors And Routing
- Workloads run on Argonne/ALCF systems and are subject to allocation and project governance rather than consumer SaaS terms.
- Deletion Controls
- Project storage and account controls apply; no inference-request deletion workflow is documented.
- Caveat
- Institutional access approval is not a privacy guarantee. Users should rely on their allocation agreement and data-management plan before sending controlled data.
No provider terms or privacy-policy link is captured in this snapshot. Review the provider’s current legal documents before sending sensitive data.
Eligibility
- Approved Project Required
- Yes
- Programs
- Directors DiscretionaryINCITEALCCNAIRR
- Open Research Cost
- generally no cost compute allocation
- Proprietary Research
- cost recovery
Primary sources
Before you build with Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Inference Endpoints
Read the classification narrowly
This record has current first-party evidence for some zero-cost hosted inference. The label describes the bounded offer supported by evidence on 2026-09-19; it does not guarantee permanence, production suitability, uptime, latency, model quality, or access from every region.
Resolve the live model route
This snapshot records 7 model IDs. Match the exact ID against the provider's live catalog before using it in code; zero-price routes and aliases can rotate while an older documentation page remains online. The recorded base endpoint is https://inference-api.alcf.anl.gov, but the provider's current API reference remains authoritative for paths, authentication, and request shape.
Confirm account and billing boundaries
The public evidence does not settle whether an account is required. Confirm the signed-in flow before treating anonymous or credential-free access as available. The payment-card requirement is conditional or not clearly documented. Treat signup friction and billing exposure as unresolved until the account flow confirms them. The equivalent paid value shown here prices a documented allowance where possible; it is not cash, guaranteed savings, or protection from overage.
Re-read the prompt policy for your plan
This record classifies the reviewed handling as “Partially private”: Institutional controls apply, but endpoint-wide content retention, training, administrator access, and deletion terms are not public. Provider policies can distinguish free, paid, enterprise, opted-in, and feature-specific traffic, so verify the governing terms for the exact account and route that will receive your data.
Follow the evidence, then re-check it
The record links 7 first-party sources covering the offer, catalog, limits, pricing, terms, privacy, or adoption evidence available to the audit. Prefer the newest governing document or live catalog when sources disagree, and submit a correction when a provider changes a material term.
Match the quota to the workload shape
Translate the published allowance into the traffic pattern you actually expect instead of comparing headline totals alone. A daily token pool can look generous while a low requests-per-minute or concurrency ceiling blocks interactive bursts; a high request limit can still fail a long-context job when input, output, or per-request tokens are capped. Separate prompt tokens from generated tokens, include retries and tool calls, and test the largest realistic payload. If the provider documents more than one limit window, the tightest window at your peak load is the practical ceiling. Research, experimental, and community access can also carry eligibility or fair-use constraints that cannot be modeled as a simple number.
Plan fallback without changing the rules
A fallback should preserve more than API syntax. Confirm that the substitute route supports the required modality, context length, streaming behavior, structured output, tools, and safety controls, then compare its prompt-retention and training terms. An OpenAI-compatible request shape does not make providers operationally or contractually equivalent. Decide which errors may trigger a retry, cap retry storms, and prevent an exhausted free route from silently switching to a billable model. If deterministic output matters, record the model revision and sampling settings; rotating aliases and free-model pools can change behavior even when the endpoint remains available.
Monitor the offer as a dependency
Capture the model ID, response model field, rate-limit headers, usage fields, latency, HTTP status, and any provider request identifier for each test. Watch for authorization failures, quota exhaustion, catalog removal, policy revisions, and dashboard balance changes as separate failure modes. Re-check the provider’s live catalog and governing pages on a schedule proportionate to the workload’s importance, and keep the dated sources that supported your decision. Free capacity is especially suitable for prototypes, evaluations, fallbacks, and bounded workloads when the application can tolerate change; a production dependency still needs observability, an exit path, and an owner responsible for re-verification.
Test one complete request before scaling
Start with the smallest permitted request using the exact credential, model ID, endpoint, and account type you intend to deploy. Record the HTTP status, response headers, usage fields, latency, and any dashboard balance change. Then exercise the failure path: an invalid model, an exhausted quota, or a rate-limit response should fail clearly without silently switching to a paid route. If the provider supports streaming or tool calls, validate those features separately because a free model can expose a narrower capability set than its paid counterpart. Keep a budget ceiling outside the application whenever billing is possible, and avoid sending sensitive data until the observed route matches the reviewed data agreement.