Call for Proposals for the 4th DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative. Submission Deadline: 30th June 2007
The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) is an excellent way to gain access to a large amount of HPC cycles. Last year's call saw seven UK DECI projects granted a total of over 3.2 million hours on a variety of platforms spread across Europe. Indeed, the DECI not only gives you cycles but man power is also available to help you exploit the DEISA infrastructure.
DEISA, or the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, consists of 11 HPC Centres across Europe, providing a pan-European Grid of HPC resources. HPCx has been a platform within DEISA for the last 3 years and HECToR joined DEISA in May, 2008.
The DEISA infrastructure results from the integration of national HPC infrastructures employing modern Grid technologies. DEISA contributes to a significant enhancement of HPC capability and capacity in Europe. The purpose of the DECI is to enhance the impact of the DEISA research infrastructure on leading European science and technology.
This initiative consists of the identification, enabling, deploying and operating of Flagship Applications in selected areas of science and technology. These leading, ground breaking applications 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.
The DECI initially focused mainly on Grand Challenge applications that could be migrated and adapted to the DEISA environment with little or moderate application enabling work. The scope of the initiative has now been expanded to include medium to long term support for the enabling of important and complex applications. The DEISA Infrastructure is therefore ready to provide more sustained application enabling support to specific projects and to be involved more deeply in the design of leading and innovative complex simulations. Projects supported by DECI will be chosen on the basis of innovation potential, scientific excellence and relevance criteria. A priority will be given to proposals that benefit from an excellence label from more than one partner organisation. Further, proposals from PIs that have yet to benefit from DECI compute resources will be given preference.
Application Profiles Support by DECI
The following application 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 loosely synchronously on more than one platform
As mentioned above, DEISA is ready to provide support for the design and enabling of these applications. In some cases, this support can entail a medium-term commitment of human resources for the application design and enabling work (i.e. an engineer for several months).
Support To The Initiative
In order to facilitate the identification and the support and design of new leading applications adapted to DEISA, the Consortium has established an Applications Task Force. This task force consists of a number of experts in high-performance and Grid computing from each of the different DEISA member organisations.
The objective of the Applications Task Force is to carry out a prospective action with the European scientific community to support the design of new, leading applications. Scientists willing to benefit from the DEISA infrastructure should contact the Applications Task Force in advance to obtain the guidance needed to find the best fit between their requirements and the distributed supercomputing environment.
Call For Proposals
The 4th DECI Call for Proposals is now open. The deadline for submissions is the 30th of June, 2008.
The application form is available via the DEISA website at www.deisa.eu.
Contact the Applications Task Force for support in the preparation of the proposal (email to ataskf@deisa.org). Upon submission, the proposals will first be technically evaluated by the Applications Task Force, who will determine the technical requirements, the allocation of computational resources and the human resources required for the long-term application enabling. The scientific evaluation of the proposals will be done by a number of National Scientific Evaluation Committees, and they will provide recommendations to the Consortium on the proposals' scientific importance.
