DECI in Europe Issues Call for Proposals for HPC Compute Resources

PRACE logoThe Distributed European Computing Initiative (DECI) in Europe has issued its 13th Call for Proposals for HPC Compute Resources.

Administered by PRACE, DECI enables European researchers to obtain access to the most powerful national (Tier-1) computing resources in Europe regardless of their country of origin or employment and to enhance the impact of European science and technology at the highest level. Proposals must deal with complex, demanding, innovative simulations that would not be possible without Tier-1 access. Limited support for helping to get codes up and running will be provided on a best effort basis from parties involved in DECI.

The Distributed European Computing Initiative (DECI) is designed for projects requiring access to resources not currently available in the PI’s own country but where those projects do not require resources on the very largest (Tier-0) European Supercomputers or very large allocations of CPU. DECI is a resource exchange program where resources are provided by a subset of PRACE members and awarded via the juste retour principle. This means that projects from each contributing country will in total receive at least 70% of the amount of resources contributed to DECI by the PI’s own country but will be allocated to a machine with an architecture and set up which best matches the needs of that project. (On occasions projects may be placed on a machine within the PI’s own country.) The remaining time (up to 30%) is reserved for projects from countries which are not providing resources to the call. Individual projects are limited to a maximum of 5 million machine hours for a Cray or a cluster and 15 million machine hours on a BG/Q.

Access will be awarded for a period of 12 months, beginning January 18, 2016. Resources are available on the following architectures: Cray XC30/Cray XC40, IBM Blue Gene/Q, Intel clusters (various processor and memory configurations) and hybrid systems (clusters with GPGPU accelerators or Xeon Phi Co-processors) made available from Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, UK. Applicants need not specify a particular machine or architecture, but if they do, we will endeavour to take these preferences into account.

Proposals from academia and industry are eligible, as long as the project leader is undertaking non-proprietary research in a European country (European Union, candidates, associated countries and PRACE member countries). Project leaders will typically be employed in research organisations (academic or industrial). Individual HPC centres may have further restrictions on who is eligible to use the machines, e.g. due to US export rules.

Proposals are due Sept. 21, 2015.