Shadow is the cluster-local LLM service. No traffic leaves the switch. No usage is reported to Lumen. No rate limits shared with anyone outside this node. Use Chat for interactive sessions or the API for programmatic access.

Every new initiate is granted 20 souls, replenished at 0.05/hour. All cluster models are currently free. Pricing is listed on the Models page — shown for accounting purposes only.

Get a key from your Profile. Drop-in OpenAI-compatible — swap the base URL and keep your existing code:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="http://shadow.ncsa.illinois.edu/api",
    api_key="sk-shdw-your-key-here",   # not a Lumen key
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-AWQ",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello from the dark side."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

API Clients let you create named organizations with separate API keys and usage tracking — useful if you want to attribute compute cost to a lab or project without sharing your personal key.