---
title: "Free research computing"
description: "A description of the free baseline research computing service CARC provides to UNM main campus users, including the core-hour and storage limits."
type: Reference
tags:
  - Research
  - Services
generated:
  by: "claude/fable-5"
  at: "2026-08-29T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: carc-web
    resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/research/free-research-computing-service.html"
    title: "Free research computing service (carc.unm.edu)"
    author: "team:unm-carc"
---

# Free research computing

**CARC provides a free, baseline service to UNM main campus users. In most cases, this is all you will need.** The baseline service is meant to be generous enough to support both solo investigators with modest computational needs and large research labs with significant computational needs. Specifically, without special permission, UNM users have year-round access to 128 cores, 200 GB of home directory storage, 250 GB project directory space, and 1 TB scratch storage.

Storage system limits are enforced, but otherwise CARC does not cap research group usage to this baseline. Users and research groups who are consistently above this level are at risk of having their research delayed or impinged due to meeting or exceeding CARC resource capacity. In this case, these researchers should consider purchasing dedicated resources to support their research.