July 1, 2021 - by CSCS

It's that time again: Since 2009, interdisciplinary projects have been initiated for the fourth time via the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) with the overarching goal of ensuring application readiness on the emerging pre-exascale and exascale hardware architectures.

For the new period 2021 to 2024 nineteen proposals were submitted, requesting a total of CHF 8.5 million. Fifteen of them were finally approved with a total budget of CHF 6.47 million. The requirements for the submitted projects were that they are high-performance computing software development projects that address the broad availability, the quality and performance of software on GPU-accelerated supercomputing platforms. The goal is to develop application software that focuses on important scientific problems and uses GPU-accelerated high-end supercomputing infrastructures to solve them.

The new allocation period in PASC starts on 1 July 2021. Thirteen projects will receive funding for the next three years, two for two years. The selected projects cover a broad range of scientific disciplines and rely on interdisciplinary collaboration between domain scientist, mathematicians, computer scientists, computational scientists and software developers. The projects will receive the funding from the Swiss High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) initiative, which will be used to finance around 22 full-time positions for the entire duration of the projects. All projects must provide their own contributions for an equal amount. In addition, every project gets 36,000 node hours of computing time on "Piz Daint".

The funded projects are the following: 

Astrophysics/Cosmology

Chemistry and Materials

Computer Science and High-Performance Computing

Earth and Climate Sciences

Life Sciences

Physics

About PASC: www.pasc-ch.org