Catchat homepage with o4-mini presenting

Overview

Catchat is a Large Language Model Portal provided by RCI (Research Computing Infrastructure). Catchat uses publicly available models like OpenAIs gpt-oss:120b (o4-mini), mistral for programming made my mistralAI, and gemma3 which was made by google.

Catchat is free to use for all Students / Faculty / Staff at Montana State University

Environmental Impact

Catchat is maintained by Research Computing with computational resources provided by the Tempest supercomputer which is powered by approximately 80% renewable energy and cooled with systems that do not consume water.

Getting Started

Access & SecurityCatChatAPI Access

How to Use

  1. Access and Security

  2. Model Selection

  3. Tool Usage

  4. Agent Creation

  5. Connect to External Providers

  6. API Access

Available Models

gpt-oss:120b ( o4-mini ) gemma3:27b ( gemma ) mistral-small:24b ( mistral )  granite4:3b ( granite4 )

 

Use Cases

Use Case

Requirements

Recommended Models

Advanced reasoning and multi-domain research

Highest accuracy, long-context reasoning, strong factual recall, and cross-domain synthesis (science, engineering, policy, etc.)

gpt-oss:120b

Enterprise copilots / knowledge assistants

Strong reasoning, safe output, high reliability, API latency tolerance

gpt-oss:120b, gemma3:27b

General-purpose chatbots and customer service

Balanced cost–performance, multilingual fluency, context awareness

gemma3:27b, mistral-small:24b

Code generation and debugging (multi-language)

Syntax awareness, structured reasoning, efficiency on moderate hardware

gemma3:27b, mistral-small:24b

Lightweight internal automation (summaries, tagging, extraction)

Low latency, scalable inference, moderate reasoning depth

mistral-small:24b, granite4:3b

Fine-tuning / domain adaptation experiments

Model that trains efficiently, flexible licensing

mistral-small:24b, granite4:3b

Creative writing, marketing copy, dialogue

Natural tone generation, stylistic diversity, moderate context memory

gemma3:27b, mistral-small:24b

Technical document summarization

Structured understanding, moderate token context, reliability

gemma3:27b, gpt-oss:120b

Research prototyping / evaluation of LLM benchmarks

Open weights, transparency, large context

gpt-oss:120b, mistral-small:24b