PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has made its first regular call for those wishing to use PRACE resources with the standard allocation time of one year. The call is aimed at projects wishing to use the HPC system available to researchers through PRACE: the IBM BlueGene/P – Jugene – hosted by the Gauss-Centre member site in Jülich, Germany. Allocation will be for one year starting from 1 November.Jugene offers computation power of one Petaflop/s and is Europe's fastest computer (number five on the latest Top 500 list of world's most powerful computers). The term Petaflop/s means computation capability of 10 to the power of 15 floating point operations per second. In this call, a total of 360 Million compute core hours is available.
The deadline for submission of proposals is 15 August. The first 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 8,000 compute cores) 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 that 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 AISBL country. The Jugene at GCS at Jülich also has further restrictions due to US export rules. All applicants should expect to be notified of the outcome by the end of October 2010.
