In 2021, the College of Engineering (CoE) at Carnegie Mellon University founded the college’s Shared Computing Facility (SCF). Organized as a core research facility for the college and reporting to the CoE Dean’s Office through the Assistant Dean for Research, the SCF maintains and makes available for use by researchers the Tartan Research Advanced Computing Environment (TRACE), a state-of-the-art High Performance Computing cluster housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

This system, which is expandable and renews its hardware periodically, features the following:
- Dell PowerEdge servers with state-of-the-art AMD Epyc class CPUs and Nvidia Ampere class GPUs
- VAST storage array communicating with the compute nodes via Infiniband connection
- Optimized for both direct compute (RedHat) and hosting virtual machines (VMware)
- Ultra-fast data linkage to CMU campus
- Accessible via CMU login authentication

TRACE operations are administered jointly by professionals from Computing Services at Carnegie Mellon and PSC. Comprehensive support for users of this facility is provided throughout the research lifecycle from software installation and configuration to compute job submission and troubleshooting to file storage and retrieval. The facility personnel also hold workshops and offer onboarding and specialized classes for users along with creating a community who can share best practices, increasing efficiencies and fostering new research collaborations. Research groups across the College of Engineering have the opportunity to purchase subsidized priority access to compute capacity in this facility and are enabled by the system's configuration within the PSC to burst to larger CPU/GPU counts utilizing idle resources.