SCIENCE

Europe’s HPC infrastructure PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, announced that 35 projects, selected from 54 proposals, will share 91 million processor core hours awarded by the most recent DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) call. The consortia of European computational scientists whose projects were selected for funding will be given access to one of the 19 European national HPC services through a national HPC resource exchange initiative, operated by members of the PRACE association.

The successful projects will be led by researchers from 19 European countries with collaborators from the USA and Canada. The call was oversubscribed by more than a factor of 2.5. Due to the excellent quality of the proposals, the contributing partners increased the resources offered to the call by 11% over the original commitment, however this still meant that many good projects could not be granted resources.

Projects are given access to compute resources at one or more of Europe’s national supercomputers. For the first time in seven years of DECI calls, national supercomputers in Poland, Bulgaria and Ireland, in addition to national supercomputers in Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden, are participating in the HPC resource exchange initiative. The increase in number of national HPC facilities means that it has been possible to provide 55% more resources, on average, to each project as compared to the last DECI call.

Successful projects are chosen for their potential to achieve ground-breaking scientific results through the use of supercomputers. The DECI support team provides specialist applications support to adapt the scientific codes to the most appropriate architecture.

The following thirty-five projects, in alphabetical order, were awarded access to PRACE RI resources:

• NR-NSNS-BHNS (Accurate Gravitational Waves from Unequal Mass Compact Binaries and their Tidal Signatures), Bernd Brügmann, Universität of Jena, Germany

• BlackHoles, Vitor Cardoso, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal

• ARTHUS-3, Hans-Thomas Janka, Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysik, Germany

• Planck-LFI, Hannu Kurki-Suonio, University of Helsinki, Finland

• MAESTRO (Magnetized Accretion and Ejection phenomena in astrophysics), Dr. Claudio Zanni, Department Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino, INAF, Italy

• SMARC (Solar Magnetically Active Region Corona), Dr. Peter Hardi, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany

• PETAHUB (The Phase diagram of the Hubbard model by quantum Monte Carlo and Petaflop supercomputers), Sandro Sorealla, International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA, Italy

• PICKH, Dr. Pierre Henri, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

• SCW, Marco Masia, Universita’ di Sassari, Italy

• SIVE-2, Prof. Erik Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

• LASIPROD (LArge scale molecular SImulations of PROtein - DNA recognition in the combinatorial control of transcription), Dr. Vlad Cojocaru, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Germany

• VIRonSAMs, Prof. Michele Cascella, Universitat Bern, Switzerland

• LGICTAMD, Dr. Grazia Cottone, University of Palermo, Italy

• TanGrin, Vesa Hytönen, University of Tampere, Finland

• HELIXKINETICS, Dr. Robert Best, University of Cambridge, UK

• NANOBIO-2, Niall English, University College Dublin, Ireland

• PHOTMAT, Dr. Manthos G. Papadopoulos, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Greece

• CASiMIR, Dr. Patrick Jöckel, Deutsches Zentrum for Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Germany

• RBflow-2, Prof. Dr. Detlef Lohse, University of Twente, The Netherlands

• HIGHQ2FF, Dr. Giannis Koutsou, The Cyprus Institute, Cyprus

• DiSMuN (Diffusion and spectroscopical properties of multicomponent nitrides), Prof. Igor Abrikosov, Linköping University, Sweden

• NUWCLAY, Dr. Andrey Kalinichev, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France

• CatDesign, Dr. Maria Ganduglia-Pirovano, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain

• DIAVIB, Prof. Adam Gali, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary

• SIMONA, Grzegorz Kamieniarz, A. Mickiewicz University, Poland

• MIXTUDI, Alfredo Soldati, University of Udine, Italy

• HRPIPE, Prof. Dr. B. J. Boersma, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

• SPIESM (SPIESM : Seasonal prediction improvement with an Earth System Model), Prof. Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Institut Català de Cienciès del Clima, Spain

• HIFLY, Dr. Fehmi Cirak, University of Cambridge, UK

• EC4aPDEs-2, Dr. Lee Margetts, University of Manchester, UK

• EUTERPE-4, Dr. Ralf Kleiber, Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Germany

• ElmerIce, Dr. Olivier Gargliardini, Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l.Environnement, France

• HYDROGEN-ILs, Prof. Michael Bühl, University of St Andrews, UK

• WESF (for WEt & Stretched Flames), Prof. Yves D’ Angelo, Site Universitaire du Madrillet, France

• MUSIC, Dr. Mikael Djurfeldt, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

PRACE opened the DECI-8 call on November 2nd, 2011. The computing resources for this call are available from May 2012 to April 2013. The new call features additional Tier-1 systems with new computing architectures. Around 100 million core hours will be available to applicants. The call will close on 10th of January, 2012.