The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) is a scheme through which European computational scientists can apply for single-project access to world-leading computational resources in the European HPC infrastructure, operated by DEISA, for a period of up to 12 months. DECI aims to enable European researchers to obtain access to the most powerful national computing resources in Europe, regardless of their country of origin or work and to enhance DEISA's impact on European science and technology at the highest level.

Through an open, competitive call, a number of capability computing projects will be selected on the basis of innovation and scientific excellence. These projects must deal with complex, demanding, innovative simulations that would not be possible without the DEISA infrastructure, and which would benefit from the exceptional resources of the Consortium. In addition to offering access to computing resources, DEISA offers applications-enabling assistance from experts at the leading European HPC centres to enable projects to be run on the most appropriate platforms in the DEISA consortium.

Projects supported by DECI will be chosen on the basis of innovation potential, scientific excellence and relevance criteria. Priority will be given to proposals that promote collaborative research, either at a cross- national or cross-disciplinary level. Further, proposals from PIs that have yet to benefit from DECI compute and applications enabling resources may be given preference. Proposals selected under this call will be given access to the infrastructure for applications enabling from 1 October 2009 and for production runs from 1 November 2009 to 30 September 2010.

Applications profiles supported by DECI

The following applications profiles are particularly suited to the DECI:

• Large, highly scalable parallel applications requiring exceptional computational resources
• Data intensive applications requiring access to distributed data repositories
• Workflow Simulations managing simulation chains that access more than one computing platform
• Distributed applications that need to run on more than one platform (excluding metacomputing)

DEISA can provide applications enabling support (typically up to several months) for the enabling and optimisation of these applications.

Support for the Initiative

In order to facilitate the identification and the support of leading applications for the DEISA infrastructure, the Consortium has set up an 'Applications Task Force' (ATASKF) comprising experts in high performance and Grid computing from each of the DEISA member organisations.
Scientists interested in responding to the call, or in finding out more about what DECI and the DEISA infrastructure can offer them, should contact the Applications Task Force for advice on finding the best fit between their requirements and the DEISA distributed supercomputing environment.

Call for proposals

The DECI-5 Call for Proposals will close on 04 May 2009.

Answering the Call

To answer to the call, please complete the following steps:

• Contact the Applications Task Force via email at ataskf@deisa.eu to ask for support in the preparation of the DECI proposal. (It is also possible to contact your national contact partners directly, if you come from a DEISA partner country).
• Complete the template form (pdf) (with ATASKF assistance)
• Send a proposal, by 04 May 2009, to the DEISA Executive Committee (email to execomm@deisa.eu), copied to the Applications Task Force (email in cc to ataskf@deisa.eu).

The scientific evaluation of the proposals will be done by a number of National Scientific Evaluation Committees in June and they will provide recommendations to the Consortium on the proposals' scientific importance. The proposals will additionally be technically evaluated by the Applications Task Force, who will analyse the technical requirements and the human resources required for the application enabling. Decisions will be made public by the DEISA Executive Committee in July 2009.