April 16, 2019 - by CSCS
On October 30, 2018 Swiss and international researchers applied for compute time for the allocation period starting from April 1, 2019 until March 31, 2020. 39 new proposals were submitted requesting a total of 19.7 million node hours. Based on technical and scientific assessments as well as their own expertise, the five well-known scientists comprising CSCS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) recommended to distribute a total of 11 million node hours to the new proposals. The 11 ongoing projects, known as multi-year projects, requested a total of 4.5 million node hours, however only 3.3 million node hours were distributed based on utilization of the previous year. 15% of the new proposals was fully granted, 72% was granted with a reduced allocation and the remaining 13% was rejected due to severe scientific concerns and criticisms. In total 64% of the proposals applied for the hybrid partition using GPU accelerated codes, and only the remaining 36% for the purely multicore partition. The latter had to be granted with a reduced allocation due to the limited multicore resources available in this call.
Immediately before the CSCS SAC meeting, the PRACE Access Committee met in Brussels to discuss the 52 proposals submitted in the Tier-0 Call 18. Six new proposals and one multi-year renewal were granted on the hybrid Piz Daint for a total of 7 million node hours. Only two new Swiss proposals were submitted in Call 18. Both proposals were allocated, one on Piz Daint and one on the French system Curie Skylake.
ETH Zurich receives 29% of the resources granted in these first two calls of 2019, followed by 17 and 13% for EPF Lausanne and University of Zurich, respectively. 11% of the resources were distributed to the other Swiss institutes, such as Universities of Bern, Geneva, Fribourg, USI, EMPA and PSI. The remaining 30% of the resources were allocated to excellent international proposals.
Research projects in Chemistry & Materials received the lion-share of the resources available with 34%, followed by Earth & Environmental Science with 17%, and an equal 16% for Life Science, Mechanics & Engineering and Physics.
As for the data requests, the largest storage space was allocated to Earth & Environmental Science with 1.4 Petabytes, followed by 739 and 280 Terabytes for Mechanics & Engineering and Physics, respectively. Life Science and Chemistry & Materials were allocated 78 and 44 Terabytes remaining in the standard low range of storage requests.
The next calls for proposals for the allocation period starting on 1 October are already underway. Applications in the PRACE Tier-0 Call 19 will be accepted until April 30, at 10 AM, whereas applications in the CSCS 2019 II Call for Proposals will be accepted until May 10 at 6 PM CEST.