From One Idea to Infinite Ambition: The DSRS Story by Numbers
A single disruptive idea launched everything: an initiative to enhance data-driven research at Gies brought DSRS to life.
Spring 2026 is already here. DSRS is calling for new members. Want to join? Visit the students page.
Three total reinventions: from a humble GitHub Pages prototype to a fully interactive research portfolio website. Progress is proof of iteration over perfection. dsrs.illinois.edu
Four years since DSRS inception! Still small. Still fast. Still ambitious and obsessed with creating impact.
Six academic departments benefit from DSRS work across the University of Illinois, including ACCY, FIN, and BA from Gies College of Business.
Thirteen minds pushing code and data pipelines, using GPU nodes, creating products, and solving problems. The core and heart of DSRS.
Twenty-four production nodes running in our internal Kubernetes cluster. Because research workloads deserve autopilot, not babysitting.
More than thirty faculty and researchers supported. Not just helped. Enabled. The difference is everything.
Forty-three alumni who built dashboards, ingested terabytes, executed services, and stress-tested ideas long before they were "features." They all moved to great opportunities; they are all missed to this day.
One hundred percent dedication to data, research credibility, and problem solving.
Over one-tenth of a petabyte of DSRS-owned storage and dataset stewardship. As important as computing itself, this storage enables us to handle and store research data on our own.
More than three hundred followers on LinkedIn. Still growing. We call this "the quiet compound interest of trust."
More than four hundred research tasks completed, and more are coming our way. Each one providing a step forward toward completing researchers' goals.
Over six hundred compute cores running in our cluster for data analysis, AI modeling, and data serving. The brains of our system.
Five thousand supercompute GPU hours awarded by DeltaAI, which are being used to run LLM models, perform inference, and advance our field.
More than ten thousand cups of coffee consumed debugging pipelines. This is not a metric. This is culture. This is operational resilience.
Thirty thousand dollars awarded in OpenAI credits for faculty research acceleration.
Over 120,000 lines of code have been pushed to out Github Organization, distributed on multiple repositories, each one pushing technology.
One hundred sixty thousand dollars in research compute grants awarded by Azure Research Credits. Efficiently used to run models, serve data, and provide cloud computing to our researchers.
More than one million tokens processed in LLM analysis this past year using our private models. We interpret this as: "Faculty is discovering that text is data too."
Infinite ambition. Zero drift. One unit. Four years old. And just getting started.
