SCIENCE

PRACE is a Research Infrastructure that enables researchers from across Europe to apply for time on the PRACE resources via a peer review process. This call marks the second regular call for the PRACE resources with the standard allocation time of one year.

The call is aimed at projects to use the HPC systems available to researchers through PRACE: the IBM BlueGene/P -- JUGENE -- hosted by the Gauss Centre member site in Jülich, Germany and the BULL Bullx cluster -- Curie -- hosted by CEA (funded by GENCI) in Bruyères-Le-Châtel, France. Allocation on both systems will be for one year starting from May 1st, 2011.

JUGENE offers computation power of one Petaflop/s. The term "petaflops" means computation capability of 1015 floating point operations per second. In this call, a total of 360 Million compute core hours is available of JUGENE machine.

Curie is the second PRACE Tier-0 machine, available for the first time for European scientists via this call. Curie is based on general x86 architecture with a mix of thin and fat nodes interconnected through a QDR Infiniband interconnect. It has a total of 114 racks and a total of 92 160 processing cores. The peak performance of the 2 partitions (thin nodes and fat nodes) is 1.6 Petaflops. The memory capacity is 4 GBytes per core resulting a total distributed memory of 360 TBytes.

Curie will be installed in two phases, the first one starts in the end of 2010 with the fat nodes partition and the second phase in the end of 2011 with the thin nodes partition. A total of 40 Million core hours of Curie are available in this call on the fat nodes partition.

The deadline for submission of proposals is January 11th, 2011 at 16.00 CET.

The Second PRACE Regular call is intended for large-scale projects of high scientific quality, and for which a significant impact at European and international level is anticipated. High scalability of the code (at least 8000 compute cores for JUGENE and for Curie above 2048 / 1024 cores or above 512 cores with 64 GB of memory used per node or 256 cores with 16 threads allocated per task) must be demonstrated. Proposals for project access must be ready to run. The projects must demonstrate scientific excellence and should cover topics of major relevance for European research. They should also include elements of novelty, transformative aspects, have a recognised scientific impact and include a dissemination plan. Possible practical and timely applications resulting from the project are also desirable. The projects should also demonstrate the possibility of achieving results which will be publishable in journals of recognised scientific impact.

All proposals will undergo PRACE technical and scientific assessment. The assessment procedure will adhere to the PRACE principles of peer review. For this call only proposals from academia are eligible and the project leader must be homed in a European Union country or a PRACE RI country. Both systems also have further restrictions due to export and vendors rules. All applicants should expect to be notified of the outcome by the end of April 2011.