PRACE Access
ICHEC is a member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), which has over 20 member countries whose representative organisations work to create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure and ecosystem. PRACE provides access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.
PRACE resources, which includes some of the largest supercomputers in Europe, are accessible to applicants with successful proposals submitted in response to Calls for Proposals.
ICHEC can provide support in the preparation of PRACE resource applications.
Calls for Proposals
PRACE provides HPC resources to researchers and scientists through Preparatory Access (code scaling and optimization) and/or through Project Access (large-scale, computationally intensive projects).
Preparatory Access is intended for short-term access to resources, such as code-enabling and porting, which are required to prepare proposals for Project Access and to demonstrate the scalability of codes. The Call for Proposals for PRACE Preparatory Access is a continuously open call with cut-off dates every 3 months.
Project Access is intended for individual researchers or research groups, including multi-national research groups, and can be used either for 1-year production runs or for 2 or 3-year (Multi-Year Access) production runs. Proposal submissions are accepted in response to bi-annual calls.
DECI Tier-1 Access
DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) is a programme under PRACE designed for research projects which require different resources from those currently available in the PI’s own country. At the same time, those projects should not require resources on the very largest (Tier-0) European Supercomputers or very large allocations of CPU.
DECI is a resource exchange programme where the computational resources are provided by a subset of PRACE members and awarded via the juste retour principle. This means that projects from each contributing country will in total receive at least 70% of the amount of resources contributed to DECI by the PI’s own country but will be allocated to a machine with an architecture and set up which best matches the needs of that project. The remaining time (up to 30%) is reserved for projects from countries which are not providing resources to the call.
Who is Eligible?
Proposals are evaluated on the basis of scientific merit through a peer-review process.
- Proposals must be for open access R&D.
- Scientific and industrial research is eligible
- Irish researchers are eligible and encouraged to apply
- PRACE partners who offer access may also require specific requirements to be met for allocation on their specific machine
